Daniel Gagne

About Me

What actually pulled me toward this field was a CTF (Capture the Flag) challenge — I worked through OverTheWire's Natas wargame using Python scripts on a whim, and got hooked on the process of finding and exploiting weaknesses in a system. That curiosity is what turned "career change" into something I actively wanted to pursue, not just a plan on paper.

The monitoring station experience gave me a head start on a skill that matters a lot in SOC work: triage under alert fatigue. Working graveyard shift meant a steady stream of alarms, most of them false — normal for the field, but it forced me to get fast and accurate at filtering signal from noise. Video alarms were usually a quick visual call, but trouble and communication alarms carried a lot of detail that changed what response was actually needed. Staying precise under that volume is where attention to detail — my strongest skill — actually got built, not just claimed.

These days that same instinct shows up in how I study: comparing multiple sources side by side, including AI-assisted research tools, specifically to catch where different sources use different terminology for the same concept — that comparison is what actually sharpens understanding, rather than taking any one source at face value. Longer term, the goal is SOC Analyst first, then SOC Engineer once I've got real field experience and sharper scripting skills to bring to it.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science — Thompson Rivers University (2019)

Certifications

• Boot.Dev — Backend Developer (Completed) — view credential
• CompTIA Security+ (In progress)
• CCDL1 — Certified CyberDefender Level 1 (Planned)
  CyberDefenders' hands-on SOC analyst certification: a six-hour practical investigation covering alert triage, log analysis and incident response in a live lab.

Projects

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