whoami
My name is Gergely (Geri) Revay and I’ve been working in IT security for quite a few years now. Currently I’m a penetration tester for a German consulting company.
If you have any ideas, suggestions or questions don’t hesitate to contact me. My e-mail address in reverse is:
ten_tod_balrehtea_ta_g
I started studying IT in elementary school. Later I went to a technical high school where I specialized in IT. Hence my very first programming and administration knowledge come from that time. Another important thing in my teenage years was that I attended the local student drama club. It was a lot of fun and also very useful if one has to present in front of an audience like I do.
When I was 18 I started my university studies at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics which is a great University and I’m sure that it played an important part in what I have become and where I’m right now.
In third year I was really eager to see a bit more from the awesome world so I went to Oslo, Norway and I spent an extremely interesting and unforgettable semester there as an exchange student at Høgskolen i Oslo which is now called Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus. The most important lesson I learnt was that I love to be in an international environment and that eventually I’m a good communicator which I hadn’t thought before.
After returning to Hungary I started to work as a development trainee at Telenor Hungary. When my boss told me that I should install Linux at home as well because I was going to need it, I took his advice and hence the fun began. The company was an interesting place too, I got insight into the service provider world, learnt how MMS works and started to use php, perl, shell script etc.
I was looking for opportunities to go abroad again, and I did. That time I went to Glasgow, UK where I worked for BT as a call centre advisor in sales. Although not working in my own professional field, it was an important experience of my life. First of all since then I cannot be mad at any call centre advisor however stupid and slow they are because probably it’s just not their fault. Secondly I learned how to handle difficult people on the phone . Also one sales training in a lifetime is good for everybody, just to know how the world goes. Last but not least I got to know some of the weirdest English accents.
When I returned to Hungary after 5 months I specialized in information and network security at the university and started working for Balabit IT Security as a quality assurance engineer. I had a chance to see this development company to grow from 40 people to 150. As the company grew my job changed quite a bit. At the beginning I worked on all products from syslog-ng to Zorp firewall with their customized Linux OS called ZorpOS. I was a Test team leader for a while before the company introduced the SCRUM development methodology which is a great stuff in my opinion. I saw how individual developers and testers slowly developed to become an efficient team and worked side-by-side without any typical QA vs. developer problems, how they learned to focus on the common target of building a quality product. At the end I worked with my team on the linux based appliance called syslog-ng Store Box. It was really interesting to work with such a complex system that included linux, SAN, hardware, php, python, C, javascript, syslog, aufs etc.
Currently I work as a penetration tester digging into security as deep as I can. I also do some research when I have time.
If you’ve read this whole introduction you’ve earned my special attention so if you write to me add ‘I’ve read it’ to the topic and I’ll answer as fast as I can :). My e-mail address in reverse is: