About me
My name is Damian Monea. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and I work as a Data Scientist. I’ve had a passion for computers and electronics ever since I was 12 and I’ve spent the last 13 years learning as much as I can about the entire IT field.
Experience
CrowdStrike | 2020 - Present
I started working at CrowdStrike as an Intern in their Data Science team. From my very first day, I have worked on multiple projects that involved creating Machine Learning models that could identify malware on customer data. My main focus was on detecting malware in scripts, which was a problem with a high degree of difficulty, but I was able to create models with a high accuracy and very low False Positive rates. While these projects were successful and have helped protect our customers from threats, I have recently started to also work on research projects, where we try to come up with novel ways of detecting malware.
My overall work at CrowdStrike combines Data Science with Software Development, where I often need to write tools that leverage the models I create. These tools are then integrated into our products to expand their Threat Prevention capabilities.
BitDefender | Internship | Summer 2019
My work at BitDefender consisted of two projects I worked on.
My first project was to create a Machine Learning model that can differentiate malicious Algorithmically Generated Domains (AGDs) from normal domains. A malicious AGD would be used by an attacker as a domain for a Command and Control server, while clean AGDs would be used by companies like Apple and Facebook. The model that I created was able to classify domains with a high accuracy and low False Positive rate and was then integrated into one of the company’s products.
My second project at BitDefender included using a Graph Database to store data about domains and IPs and, based on how they are connected, to extract useful information that can be used to train another Machine Learning model to determine which new IPs and domains are malicious, based on already known malicious IPs and domains.
Education
Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science | Bachelor's Degree | 2017-2021
Ghent University | Ghent, Belgium | 2018
In 2018 I attended a two week workshop at the Ghent University in Belgium, where we studied Machine Learning concepts. This workshop was the start of my career in Data Science. Over these two weeks, we completed three projects that introduced us to Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning (Deep Q-Learning).
Barco | Kortrijk, Belgium | 2018
To wrap up the two week workshop I attended in Belgium, we attended a Computer Vision workshop at the Barco Headquarters, where we were able to get hands-on experience with OpenCV for Python.