Profile

Security professional focused on security operations, detection engineering, and incident response, with experience in hands-on security assessment and a background in software engineering.

Areas of focus

• Blue-team operations, threat hunting, and incident response
• SIEM, EDR, and detection engineering
• Analytics rules, Sigma detections, playbooks, and runbooks
• Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing
• Security architecture and control integration
• Security automation and scripting

Experience

Helaba · Vice President Cybersecurity Manager

June 2025 – Present · Frankfurt region

• SOC operations: Oversee service delivery and manage the SOC service provider.
• Incident response: Analyze and respond to security incidents using Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender.
• Detection engineering: Develop and tune analytics rules; create and maintain response playbooks and runbooks.
• Threat hunting: Investigate suspicious activity and identify opportunities to improve detection coverage.

ACG Automation Consulting Group · Senior Cybersecurity Analyst

November 2020 – May 2025 · Frankfurt

• Security monitoring: Monitored and investigated activity at KfW using ArcSight, Splunk, and Microsoft Sentinel.
• SIEM and detection: Developed Sigma detections and configured an internal OpenSearch SIEM.
• Security assessment: Performed vulnerability assessments and internal infrastructure penetration tests.
• Security training: Created practical CTF exercises and phishing-awareness activities.

Student Developer · Ericsson

Frankfurt Rhine-Main region

• Developed Gradle and Jenkins automation for testing and deployment of the Ericsson BSCS product.
• Built Java, PHP, and Spring applications; integrated single sign-on with Keycloak.
• Implemented Kafka messaging and investigated Java resource use with JNI/JVMTI.
• Created browser test automation with Python and Selenium; contributed to a Flutter application.

Research Assistant · Technische Universität Darmstadt

Darmstadt, Germany

• Developed a WordPress plugin for cybercrime reporting.
• Designed a Hyperledger smart-contract proof of concept.
• Built a Python LSTM prototype for forecasting Linux machine vulnerabilities, with a Django backend.

Education

M.Sc. IT Security · Technische Universität Darmstadt

Thesis on detecting and sharing crisis-related events using social-media data, machine-learning classification, and a Flutter application. The best evaluated model achieved an 85% macro-F1 score.

B.Sc. Information Technology · Technische Universität Darmstadt

Thesis on implementing an infrastructureless private set intersection protocol for Android using Bluetooth.

Certifications and training

• EC-Council Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst v2 (CTIA)
• Microsoft Security Operations Analyst Associate (SC-200)
• OffSec Defense Analyst (OSDA)
• OffSec Certified Professional (OSCP)
• CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CySA+)
• eCPPTv2 · INE Security
• eJPT · INE Security
• CompTIA PenTest+
• CompTIA Security+
• Google Cybersecurity Certificate
• Linux Professional Institute Certified Administrator (LPIC-1)
• Splunk 7.x Fundamentals Part 1
• BVH Börsenführerschein · Bundesverband der Börsenvereine an deutschen Hochschulen

Research

• Co-author, A social media-based AI layer on the edge for handling emergency-related events.

Connect

For professional enquiries, connect with me on LinkedIn or reach me at melnik.maksim@hotmail.com. You can also find my work on GitHub.