Work history

Banks, newsrooms and nonprofits

Three internships at Capitec in forensics, offensive security and fraud detection. Two years of development, security and reporting at GroundUp. And running all the IT for small organisations that had nobody else to do it.

Rack unit 3

GroundUp News NPC

Cybersecurity & IT consultant / developer · freelance columnist

Aug 2024 – present
Remote

Audited all of GroundUp’s systems for security vulnerabilities and presented the findings with fixes.
Reported and wrote 18 articles on fraud, scams, data breaches and government IT.
Built and tested features on the news platform, including two custom-coded special feature articles.
Detected and stopped a denial-of-service attack: patched the affected servers, hardened them against a repeat, identified the attacker and wrote a technical report.
Led the upgrade of all Linux systems and the move to Cloudflare, and migrated the organisation to Google Workspace with tailored permissions.

Python / Django Ubuntu Nginx Cloudflare

Capitec Bank

Intern: fraud prevention and detection

Dec 2025 – Jan 2026
Stellenbosch

Investigated potentially fraudulent activity across the bank’s financial systems and transaction environments.
Used SQL, Power BI and data analysis to identify anomalous account behaviour, suspicious transaction patterns and high-risk entities.
Used trend analysis and behavioural profiling to spot new fraud patterns.
Helped uncover large-scale fraud by correlating data, detecting anomalies and linking related accounts.

Capitec Bank

Intern: cyber security analyst

Jun 2025 – Jul 2025
Stellenbosch

Worked across red, blue and purple team functions to simulate, detect and respond to threats.
Did internal penetration testing: breaking out of endpoint environments and moving laterally across the network.
Tested APIs with Postman and Burp Suite; discovered and reported a critical internal vulnerability.
Identified a flaw allowing unauthorised downloading of email attachments to personal devices.

Capitec Bank

Intern: forensics monitoring and operations

Dec 2024 – Jan 2025
Stellenbosch

Identified and analysed financial fraud, and presented ways to fight it.
Monitored fraud patterns and did open-source intelligence work using social media and graph databases (GraphQL, Memgraph).
Automated parts of fraud detection so fraudulent activity and false information could be found at scale, and gathered evidence to help take down fraudulent sites.

Digifend (Pty) Ltd

Founder · digifend.com

Jul 2023 – present
Cape Town

Designed and built websites for small businesses, nonprofits and sole proprietors, including hosting, domains, DNS, servers and email.
Set up and deployed workstations for clients, with hardware, software and settings suited to how they work.
Graphic design: posters, presentations, billboards, social media posts and website banners.

DR Sports & Development NPC

Head of information technology

Jun 2023 – Jan 2026
Cape Town

Responsible for all IT: the website, hosting, Azure, Microsoft 365 and internal software.
Set up the organisation’s mail, storage, permissions and security settings, and migrated users across.
Built and deployed internal HR software; rolled out DocuSeal, Canva for Nonprofits, Salesforce and SendGrid.
Designed and built the organisation’s website, from the first planning meetings through to ongoing maintenance.

Education

Stellenbosch University Feb 2024 – Dec 2026 · Stellenbosch

BSc Computer Science, majoring in computer science with a minor in economics. First year passed cum laude.

Protea Heights Academy Jan 2019 – Dec 2023 · Cape Town

National Senior Certificate with an 88% average and six distinctions. Honours in academics and economics, top five in the grade overall, and first in IT and economics. Team Governor and finalist in the SA Reserve Bank MPC Schools Challenge.

Toolkit

Security

Burp Suite Wireshark Postman Pen testing Fraud analysis

Build

Python Django JavaScript Java HTML/CSS Delphi SQL

Run

Linux Nginx Azure Microsoft 365 Google Workspace Cloudflare Power BI