About me

The quieter you become, the more you can hear… (c)

The story I want to tell…

… or how I entered the InfoSec field

My name’s Veronica Zvereva, and I’m a security analyst. I’m jolly excited and proud of what I do. My job is my hobby and my passion. My IT education has mostly been self-study since I got my first PC around 2008 or 2009. In those days, I believed ICQ was like a PC number (similar to a phone number) plastered on the desktop. That PC was put together by many IT enthusiasts at our local IT market, and it was an absolute calamity! Every month or so, it would do something outrageous, pushing the boundaries of what I considered the worst PC could be. I could expect any horror from it: sudden shutdowns, throwing me back to square one and forcing me to start again, or freezing so solidly that I felt I was freezing too, but more out of desperation. It could also give me a dreaded “blue screen”. Every day was a “surprise”. Not long after this “treasure,” I purchased my first router (as if one wasn’t enough), which was equally frustrating. Soon after buying it, it began demanding daily resets and reconfigurations (almost every day), and neither the IPS nor the router’s tech support was of any help. Both (I mean the PC and the router) ended up in our hallway several years later and were snatched up by some unsuspecting neighbour. I often complained about those two precious “fellas,” but now I appreciate how valuable they became. They both compelled me to delve into IT and laid the foundation for my IT mindset, eventually leading me to become who I am today.

As a fresher, I had to take mandatory philosophy classes, and initially, I considered them nothing more than a compulsory part of the curriculum—boring and unavoidable. However, one fine (or not so fine…) day, our professor introduced us to a theory—pragmatism—that emphasises the practical application of what we learn and know. I studied at Moscow State University in the Historical Department, and one could say that my chosen career path was less aligned with that theory. That theory completely transformed my perspective because I had never viewed my life from that angle before. It hit me like a bolt from the blue! Upon introspection, I realised that my past and future potential experiences wouldn’t enable me to make a meaningful, practical contribution to this rapidly changing and evolving world. That was a pivotal moment in my life. From that day forward, I started searching for a professional field where I could make a positive difference, and I finally found one: information security.

Since I was a wee lass, I’ve always been fond of solving puzzles and riddles. All my career and educational choices were driven by that passion: law—to solve crimes; history—to unravel historical enigmas; medicine—to crack the puzzles of human diseases. I remember reading children’s books about being a detective and a spy, brimming with puzzles and clever tricks. Back in school, I even created my cyphers to exchange notes with a friend without the teacher uncovering the contents. And then, during my final two years of high school and the initial years of university, I became obsessed with PC games from the “Sherlock Holmes vs XXXXX” series, where I had to decipher encrypted messages amidst other brain teasers. At that time, I hadn’t read any books on cryptography, but I still managed to solve such puzzles in English intuitively, and boy, was it a magnificent feeling! So, you could say I’m a dopamine addict.

To conclude, I’d like to share a wise quote. Once upon a time, a sagacious individual said: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. So, I am very happy because I have found one! I am crazy and proud of my work; it has become my hobby and my passion because it can help us make this world a better place :)

Research Interest

1. Digital forensics
2. Data recovery
3. Reverse engineering
4. Incident Response
5. Penetration testing

Main skills

1. Reverse engineering
2. Mobile application security
3. Web application security
4. Digital forensics
5. Incident Response
6. Threat Hunting

Publications

1. Garskova I.M, Zueva V.A.

Certificates

1. Certified Ethical Hacker v9
2. Coursera: Software Security (Coursera, Maryland University), Cryptography (Coursera, Maryland University)
3. Udemy: SDF Windows Prefetch Forensics, Mobile Forensics
4. Autopsy
5. TestDaF

Hobbies

1. Music (Violin 🎻 )
2. Cryptography, riddles, puzzles 🧩
3. Eastern martial arts 🥋
4. Foreign languages ( 🇬🇧, 🇪🇸 , 🇩🇪 )
5. Buddhism philosophy 🧘
6. Psychology 🧠

Resume

My resume can be found here.