AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy -- AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy – This week’s Wyvern Warrior of the Week is U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marcus Dunham, 31st Communications Squadron client systems supervisor.
The day-to-day routine of a Client Systems Technician can vary. According to Dunham, they can be doing anything from fixing email issues to things as complex as configuring and building an operating system.
“We are key factors in maintaining network integrity,” said Dunham. “Essentially, we help install and maintain the cyber systems we all need to ensure mission success.”
Dunham orchestrated the resolution of the local national identification and network access mandates.
“My colleagues and I basically had to build the process for issuing network access tokens from scratch,” said Dunham. “We had to contact and coordinate with separate agencies to accurately create a plan of action to grant access for all local nationals on Aviano, in doing so we made sure the crucial mission support provided by over 600 personnel continued successfully without much work stoppage.”
Orchestrating this resulted in Aviano becoming the first United States European Command base to issue access cards to local nationals and safeguard national security requirements and preventing a work stoppage for 600 local nationals across 13 units.
Additionally, Dunham rebuilt the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) computer image, that is used across Aviano, by editing 113 programs to be compliant with the Defense Information Systems Agency regulations. This resulted in the remediation of 3,200 security vulnerabilities while securing 147 secret computers from adversarial action. This improved Aviano’s cyber readiness score from 32% to 51%, which is the third highest of all 18 United States Air Forces in Europe bases.
“Typically, I’m a behind the scenes type of worker that doesn’t need a lot to feel accomplished,” said Dunham. “However, it does feel nice to be recognized occasionally, I really appreciate it.”