Author: Lucy Roller
Lucy is a student employee with Technology Services.
When you play any game of strategy, whether it be chess or cards, understanding the mind of your opponent is crucial. Getting into the other player’s head allows you to anticipate their next move, defend against it, and ultimately take the victory.
A love for this kind of strategic thinking is what drove Steve Fletcher to an early passion for history. In his youth, he would play tabletop games of strategy with friends, recreating famous historical battles. What interested him most about these games was trying to get into the heads of his enemies, “learning how the bad guys think, what they might do, and what their purposes are.”
This urge to defeat something by knowing how it works eventually led Steve to his position here with us at Tech Services as a member of the Cybersecurity Operations team. Since last semester’s Canvas incident, the team has been more dedicated than ever to keeping Illinois students, staff, and faculty safe online. As a Cybersecurity Analyst, Steve works to identify and eliminate digital threats before the general campus population even becomes aware of them.
“I see it as a puzzle,” said Steve. “When you see something and go, okay, this looks suspicious, you’ve got to piece together things and do your research and figure out, what do we need to do, what’s the next steps we need to take?”
Part of Steve’s position is evaluating the immediacy of a threat and deciding what needs to be addressed right away. “I heard one time somebody described it as being on a submarine, that most of the time is day-to-day monotony, nothing happens. But then when things DO happen [they really happen.]”
Before his time at Tech Services working to lower digital risk, Steve worked with a wide variety of campus groups in his previous position as a Field Consultant. From the Counseling Center to Animal Sciences, to the College of Media, that position gave him a ton of contacts across campus, which has been a major help to him in his current Cybersecurity Analyst role when trying to resolve tech issues. “There’s times things will come up, and I’ll be like, oh yeah, here’s the person we need to talk to. It’s been kind of nice to actually have that inside picture of things.”
The collaborative nature of Tech Services is deeply important to Steve, and he emphasized the values at the core of the position. “Honestly, the thing is, we’re not here to tell people, no, you can’t do that. We are here to work with people. We are here to collaborate. We are here to help. That’s our whole purpose.” He reaffirmed that one of the Cybersecurity team’s main goals is to work with campus groups, collaborating to find the best solutions and procedures for all.
Though Steve has come so far, he still will return to that original love of strategy games. In his free time, he enjoys playing tabletop games and also video games as a way to keep in touch with friends across state lines. “I do enjoy the social activity of getting together, playing a game with someone who, you know, we might have different interests outside of it, but we all have an interest in coming to the table and having fun. Politics and the rest of the world can be left to the side; we can just sit down and enjoy the game.”
“Behind the Screens” is a series of stories highlighting a different member of Technology Services each month so that you can get to know who we are and what we do for our university.