Michael M.
About
I'm an IT professional and recent cybersecurity graduate based in Knoxville, Tennessee. I currently work as a Help Desk Analyst at Altar'd State, supporting 150+ retail locations across Cisco Meraki networking, Active Directory administration, and Oracle Xstore POS systems.
I hold a B.S. in Computer Science: Cybersecurity from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Magna Cum Laude, 3.8 GPA, May 2026) and I'm actively pursuing CompTIA Security+ and A+. I have hands-on incident response experience from a live phishing and account takeover campaign at UTC, and two years of blue team competition experience through Southeast CCDC. I'm looking for SOC Tier 1, Cyber Defense, or IT Security roles.
Experience
Help Desk Analyst — Altar'd State
- Resolved 51 tickets in a single week at 100% SLA compliance with an average resolution time of 2 hours.
- Managed Cisco Meraki infrastructure across 150+ retail locations, supporting ~750 switches, ~500 APs, and 150 WAN devices.
- Administered Active Directory for a 1,200-account enterprise environment, handling provisioning, deprovisioning, domain joins, and Office 365 licensing.
- Troubleshot Oracle Xstore POS systems across 600+ registers, resolving configuration, networking, and hardware issues for pinpads, receipt printers, and cash drawers.
- Authored 5 knowledge base articles adopted team-wide to standardize resolution workflows for recurring incidents.
IT Operations Intern — Altar'd State
- Built ticket routing automations in FreshService that reduced team ticket volume by 81%, from 1,300 to under 250 per month, by auto-routing on district groupings and eliminating manual triage.
IT Support / IT Security — University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
- Assisted security analysts in responding to a live phishing and account takeover campaign, triaging compromised accounts, auditing malicious inbox rules, rotating credentials, and reverting unauthorized banking changes made by attackers targeting university financial systems.
- Accelerated a NIST documentation alignment project by applying Google Dorking against the UTC.edu domain to locate outdated references, significantly reducing a multi-week manual effort.
- Resolved ~30 tickets per week across Windows, macOS, and Linux environments.
Skills
| Area | Tools / Technologies |
|---|---|
| Security | Phishing Triage, Incident Response, Windows Event Viewer, Nmap, Wireshark, Burp Suite, NIST Framework |
| Infrastructure | Active Directory, Cisco Meraki (Switches, APs, WAN), Okta, Office 365, Google Workspace |
| Systems | Windows Server, Windows 10/11, macOS, Linux (CLI) |
| Scripting | PowerShell (AD automation, troubleshooting), Python (familiar), Bash (familiar) |
| ITSM | FreshService, TeamDynamix, JIRA |
Projects
Badges: Homelab = personal lab project | Work = professional environment | Competition = CCDC
Personal homelab running Pi-hole for DNS-level filtering with custom firewall rules and network segmentation to isolate services. Planned expansion into DNS/DHCP services, Active Directory, and SIEM tooling for hands-on blue team practice.
Competed in the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in 2025 and 2026, defending Linux and Windows environments against live red team attacks. Identified a rogue process during a live attack by tracing the malicious binary through Windows Event Viewer, halting further system compromise. Hardened Active Directory by rotating credentials and enforcing group policy changes on password requirements under active credential attacks.
Diagnosed write failures on Zebra RFD8500 RFID hardware across retail locations. Traced root cause to locked EPC Gen2 tag blocks.
Certifications & Education
Contact
| Location | Knoxville, Tennessee |
| michaelrmeschede@gmail.com | |
| linkedin.com/in/mikemeschede | |
| GitHub | github.com/mmeschede |
| Status | Open to opportunities |