Hello, my name is Luke Nachtigal, and I am a twenty-seven-year-old, third-year student, attending FHSU virtually. I live in Hutchinson, KS, where I reside with and assist my very elderly grandparents who are in their nineties. Helping my family is a very significant part of my life. I also work full-time with a real estate company by the name of Cushman & Wakefield, where I schedule and coordinate after hours emergency facility services, nationwide, for the corporate clients that we contract with, such as: Domino’s Pizza, Bank of the West, PepsiCo, National Vision, H& R Block, Chipotle, and Brink’s just to name a few. At my job, I have the privilege of seeing how a lot of business is conducted at the corporate-level, while speaking with very interesting individuals.

My major is Information Networking and Telecommunications with a Concentration in Cybersecurity. I am very passionate about wanting to protect others and their data from threat actors, and sincerely wish to incorporate this passion into a life-long career. There will always be a need for information security, as a majority of the modern world is connected to networks. Work, school, entertainment, and even our SCADA-powered infrastructure is network-connected. All of these ares have vulnerabilities in which threat actors can target and exploit. The importance of cybersecurity cannot be overstated, and I feel that we take our online security for granted, and even trifle with this. There will always be potentially devastating consequences for poor security implementation and neglect. Our world is facing very sophisticated threat delivery mechanisms and threat actors, some of which are geopolitically motivated, perpetrated by nation state threat actors. We are under attack by electronic threats that are often invisible. This is something in which we will be required to protect ourselves against as long as these threats continue to evolve.

Throughout this course, I hope to research methods in which the modern world can better protect its network-connected systems from all types of threats. I believe that this understanding will be crucial in staying one step ahead of the bad guys so to speak.

I am late joining this course as well, due to some last-minute course schedule changes. I am required to take this course for my major, and Dr. Loggins was very generous in allowing me to attend. I have found this course significantly different in layout from all of my other courses, and it has been a little confusing for me to navigate; poor Dr. Loggins is probably annoyed by my dumb questions. All in all, I feel that a very smooth platform is utilized once one understands how to navigate through all of this.

I am looking forward to joining a discussion group, and I feel that a cool group name could be CryptoDefenders.

I wish all of you a great semester, and I look forward to reading your blog posts and engaging discussions with you. I have seen a lot of brilliantly written posts thus far.

Best