Rising Star: Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden

Age: 28

Organization: Creative Computing Solutions

Title: Incident Response Analyst, under contract to the Office of the Secretary of Defense

Nominated for: Implementing a workflow process that enabled the Computer Incident Response Team to provide uninterrupted cybersecurity support during a time of intense network demand and diminished manpower.

First IT mentor: Garrett Hanson

What you're most proud of accomplishing on the job: At CIRT, my goal was to fully automate or use scripts to augment the speed, efficiency and accuracy of each task. Tracking down and identifying an offending host used to take 20 to 30 minutes; my scripts now do this in 5 to 10 seconds. The technique for pulling user history used to take 90 minutes to 2 hours; it now takes 10 to 15 seconds.

Career highlight: Recently, OSD was faced with an incursion from the National Security Agency’s Red Team. By applying established incident response methodologies, we were able to identify, contain, eradicate and recover from the attack within a relatively short span of time.

Your advice for a government IT wannabe: If you consistently produce quality work and don't cut corners, it will show through and others will take notice that you are reliable.

What you enjoy most about working in government IT: There is a very real, very tangible purpose to the work that we do.

Favorite job-related bookmarks/apps: FindIPAddress.org, PDFCrowd.com, PDFXray.com

Meet the rest of the 2012 Rising Star winners.