Valentin Chaigneau

At the end of my engineering studies in cybersecurity at INSA Centre Val de Loire, I had the opportunity to work for a small company named EGYDE (which later joined KPMG), composed of fewer than ten people. I didn’t know it at the time, but this experience was going to allow me, and still does today, more than 8 years later, to explore many aspects of cybersecurity.

Red team, penetration testing, phishing campaigns, incident response, SOC, cloud, automation, and even developing a “serverless” web portal: every day is different, which has allowed me to acquire a somewhat unique professional background.

During these years, I was fortunate to collaborate with many companies of varying sizes and industries (finance, insurance, industry, energy, transportation, professional services), from small to large enterprises, around the world, from Africa to the United States and, of course, Canada. This diversity has particularly allowed me to understand that issues depend not only on technical aspects but also on the business context.

And what better way to combine business and technical skills than developing a tool? It was in a café in Montreal (those who know, know) that I began developing the initial algorithms for a tool designed to optimize my workdays. This tool became an API and today, a serverless platform on AWS deployed with Terraform (I would like to thank the person who made this progress possible), used by more than 200 people. I am its “Product Owner,” with a team of three people (a tech lead and two developers) whom I also salute.

Although this project is close to my heart, it is not my main activity. Indeed, I am primarily a cybersecurity consultant at KPMG in Montreal, responsible for the phishing practice and also a pentester (OSCP). I have had the opportunity to conduct red team assessments as well as external, internal, Wi-Fi, and application penetration tests, and to build the infrastructures behind them (C2, phishing platforms).

But what better way to understand these attacks than to investigate them? Through incident response and SOC missions, I have had the chance to work on major cybersecurity incidents, from ransomware attacks to deploying security solutions in compromised environments, which has allowed me to grasp the impacts of attacks both operationally and in terms of business.

I will stop here. I would have liked to say more, but perhaps I will do so in a video (as you can see in the Videos section). If I had to define my career as I see it today, I would say it resembles that of a “Swiss Army knife” (those who know, know).

Random Hashtag: #Thanks #JAJN3 #RénoDépôt