Asande Ngcobo

Senior Technical Support Engineer with 8+ years of enterprise IT experience, specializing in email security, cloud identity, network engineering, and incident investigation across Microsoft 365 and Azure environments. Strong customer-facing engineer known for resolving complex escalations, investigating phishing and security incidents, and supporting large hybrid enterprise networks.

• CCNP Enterprise
• CCNA Routing & Switching
• Palo Alto Networks - PCNSE
• EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
• EC-Council Certified Cloud Security Engineer (CCSE)
• Juniper JNCIA (Cloud)
• Juniper DevOps Associate
• Juniper Design Associate
• Mimecast Gateway Technical Specialist
• Advanced Kubernetes
• Advanced Docker
• SQL (Advanced)
• Google Apigee API Design & Fundamentals

• Personal SOC & Incident Response Lab, Designed and built a virtual SOC lab using Hyper-V, Windows Server, Windows endpoints, and Linux attacker systems., Implemented centralized logging and monitoring via a SIEM platform to collect authentication, endpoint, and network events., Simulated real-world attack scenarios including brute-force authentication attempts, malicious PowerShell execution, and suspicious outbound traffic., Performed full incident response lifecycle activities: detection, alert triage, investigation, containment, and lessons learned., Documented incident timelines and tuned detections to reduce false positives.
• Email Security & Phishing Defense Simulation, Built a phishing simulation environment to analyze common social engineering and credential-harvesting techniques., Designed secure email gateway rule logic aligned with Mimecast-style controls and enterprise best practices., Configured and evaluated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment to prevent domain spoofing., Implemented and tested email DLP policies to detect and prevent sensitive data exfiltration., Analyzed phishing bypass techniques and proposed improvements to detection and prevention controls.
• Network Segmentation & Zero Trust Principles Lab, Designed a segmented network architecture using VLANs and least-privilege access principles., Simulated compromise scenarios to validate reduced lateral movement and limited blast radius., Performed attack path analysis to identify security gaps and improve network isolation., Applied Zero Trust concepts to practical enterprise network use cases.

• Graphic Design
• Music Production
• Outside of work, I enjoy creating music and spending time hiking.