About

Welcome to my portfolio. My name is Kevin Cochrane. First and foremost, I am a husband and a father. My family is my absolute priority.

In order to change my families future, and to give my son the best opportunities in life, I have made the daunting decision to change my career from teaching to Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity.

I discovered Ethical Hacking in 2020 during Covid. I was living in Madrid at the time and was bored browsing Udemy for something to do. I came across a deeply discounted course and decided to buy it. I started the course, but got derailed by some unforseen circumstances. Then in 2022, while on holiday in Ireland, I picked up the course again and immediately fell in love with the challenges and complexity that hacking presents. I quickly developed a passion for hacking and have been learning as much as possible since. This included doing some courses in Ethical Hacking on Udemy, then doing the Bug Bounty courses available on HacktheBox, and then achieving my CompTIA Network + Certification in March 2024. I am currently working towards my CompTIA Security + Certification as well. Beyond that, I aim to get my CompTIA Pentester + Certification.

I am an aspiring Ethical Hacker with a passion for Cybersecurity and IT in general. My journey in IT began in 2008 when I was working for an Engineering company. The company utilized hundreds of loggers in the field that would log voltage data for 24 hours at a time and return that data in CSV form. This amounted to an insurmountable mountain of data that we had no way of quickly investigating. I decided to teach myself C# and wrote a program that took all that data and churned out human-readable graphs with automatic warnings if there were any problems detected with the voltage.

In 2009 I started my own e-commerce store selling IT hardware and software throughout South Africa. I ran every aspect of the business, including product management, customer support, sales, logistics, administration, and development. I had to teach myself some PHP to make specific improvements to the website. I also built custom PCs for clients and did some basic maintenance and support work. I sold the business in 2014.

Although I have not worked in IT since selling my business, I have maintained my love for the field. I decided to leave South Africa in 2017 and have since lived in South Korea, Spain, Costa Rica, and Vietnam while teaching English. I have been searching for something that challenges me and gets me out of bed in the morning. Ethical Hacking is it.