Bert Darnell

Cybersecurity ProfessionalHelp Desk Specialist

Summary

Cybersecurity-focused IT professional with hands-on experience in incident detection/escalation, identity and access administration, endpoint recovery, and enterprise authentication support in a HIPAA-regulated healthcare environment. B.S. in Information and Computer Science with Cisco CCNA and Cisco CyberOps Associate certifications. Strong foundation in Active Directory, Imprivata SSO/MFA, networking troubleshooting, and security monitoring through both production support and homelab work (Wazuh/Kibana, Proxmox, Linux, WireGuard). Targeting SOC Analyst, Security Analyst, IAM Analyst, or Junior Cybersecurity roles.

Experience

Questeq (contracted to Heritage Valley Health System)

October 2024 - Present

Help Desk Specialist — Security / Infrastructure / IAM Support

Beaver, PA

  • Support identity and access requests across enterprise healthcare applications, including user account updates, access changes, and deprovisioning activities.
  • Administer Active Directory user accounts, workstation policies, and security groups; audit group memberships and enforce least-privilege access in a HIPAA-regulated environment.
  • Investigated anomalous remote authentication activity by validating user-reported location against active login behavior, initiated immediate credential security steps, escalated to security personnel, and documented the incident through resolution.
  • Author and distribute formal incident reports to leadership and relevant stakeholders, documenting timelines, actions taken, escalation paths, and follow-up outcomes.
  • Deploy and troubleshoot Imprivata SSO/MFA across clinical endpoints, workstations, and remote physician offices.
  • Reimage and restore endpoints after security checks and suspected compromise events to return systems to a known-good state.
  • Troubleshoot VPN, DNS, and DHCP issues via CLI and support Cisco gateway configurations across 2 hospital campuses and 50+ remote physician offices.

Various

2013 - 2023

Additional Experience

  • Direct Support Specialist, Nodaway County Services (2023) — maintained detailed records for 20+ clients with strong attention to confidentiality and documentation quality.
  • Night Auditor, Holiday Inn & Cobblestone Inn & Suites (2021–2022) — nightly financial reconciliations, basic network/printer troubleshooting, overnight operational support.
  • Crew Lead, Hill Brother Construction (2018–2020) — coordinated up to 3 crews across multiple job sites.

Personal Projects

Security & Infrastructure Homelab

2024 - Present

Proxmox VE, Wazuh, Kibana, WireGuard, Pi-hole, Unbound, TrueNAS, ZFS, Linux

  • Built and administered a Proxmox VE homelab with 5+ VMs supporting security monitoring, Linux services, storage, and remote access testing.
  • Deployed Wazuh (SIEM/IDS) with Kibana dashboards and practiced log ingestion, alert analysis, and SOC-style triage workflows.
  • Simulated attack scenarios (brute-force, lateral movement) to validate detections and tune alerts.
  • Implemented WireGuard VPN for secure remote access and configured firewall rules and network segmentation for service isolation.
  • Deployed Pi-hole with Unbound (DNSSEC-capable recursive DNS) and administered TrueNAS SCALE with ZFS, NFS/SMB shares, and automated backup/DR procedures.

Networking & Scripting Practice

2024

Python, Bash, TCP/UDP sockets

  • Developed TCP/UDP client-server socket scripts in Python to reinforce networking fundamentals and packet-flow behavior.
  • Built a shell utility to collect recent CLI history across Bash/Zsh environments for troubleshooting and workflow auditing.