Work history

Banks, newsrooms and nonprofits

Three internships at Capitec across forensics, offensive security and fraud detection. Two years of newsroom engineering at GroundUp. Whole IT stacks run for small organisations that had nobody else to run them.

Rack unit 3

GroundUp News NPC

Cybersecurity & IT consultant / developer · freelance columnist

Aug 2024 – present
Remote

Audited all systems for cybersecurity vulnerabilities and presented findings with resolutions.
Built and tested features on the news platform, including two custom-coded special feature pieces.
Detected and mitigated a denial-of-service attack: patched the affected servers, hardened against recurrence, identified the attacker and produced a technical report.
Ran the upgrade of all Linux systems and the migration to Cloudflare; 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.
Ran trend analysis and behavioural profiling to detect emerging fraud patterns.
Helped uncover large-scale fraudulent activity through data correlation, anomaly detection and account linkage analysis.

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.
Conducted 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 combat it.
Monitored fraud patterns and conducted open-source intelligence using social media and graph databases (GraphQL, Memgraph).
Automated fraud detection to speed up mass identification of fraudulent activity and falsified information, and produced information to aid takedowns of fraudulent sites.

Digifend (Pty) Ltd

Founder · digifend.com

Jul 2023 – present
Cape Town

Websites designed and built for small businesses, nonprofits and sole proprietorships — including hosting, domains, DNS, servers and mail.
Configured and deployed workstations for clients, tailoring hardware, software and system settings to their needs.
Graphic design: posters, presentations, billboards, social posts, hero images.

DR Sports & Development NPC

Head of information technology

Jun 2023 – Jan 2026
Cape Town

Owned every part of IT: website, hosting, Azure, Microsoft 365, 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 developed the organisation’s website, from stakeholder 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, 88% average with six distinctions. Honours in academics and economics; top five overall, first in IT and first in economics. Team Governor and finalist, 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