Junior Engineer - Working Student Thesis

About Gen:

When you’re part of Gen, you’ll have the flexibility, tools and support to do your best work and grow your career – from flexible working options and time off to competitive pay, benefits and well-being programs.

About the Role:

A suspicious web redirect is often just one step in a much larger chain. A traffic distribution system (TDS) decides where a visitor goes next based on signals such as their browser, location, referrer, or previous activity. In malicious campaigns, this can make the infrastructure difficult to observe and the final destination difficult to reach consistently.

In this student position, you will investigate TDS infrastructure, understand its routing logic, and develop tools to capture browser activity, reconstruct redirection chains, and map the relationships between their components. The aim is to build a reusable approach to understanding how different TDS instances route visitors from an entry point to a final destination. The work will form the basis of your diploma thesis at Gen.

With guidance from the team, you will develop your malware analysis and reverse engineering skills while using AI to help build and validate tooling for TDS research.

Key Responsibilities:

• Analyze TDS infrastructure and investigate how it routes malicious traffic
• Reverse engineer and deobfuscate JavaScript to understand routing and evasion techniques
• Inspect and modify HTTP traffic, including headers, cookies, and redirects, using Chrome DevTools, Fiddler, Burp Suite, or similar tools
• Use AI to help develop and validate tools in JavaScript, Python, or other scripting languages for automated analysis and infrastructure mapping
• Test your findings and document the methods and results in your diploma thesis
• Perform other duties as instructed by your supervisor

Interview Structure:

The following steps have already been completed for the current candidate:

• Two discussions, one 60-minute session and one 30-minute session, covering the student's current skills, the homework assignment, mutual expectations, and the initial thesis direction
• A practical homework assignment, which the student successfully passed
• Initial alignment on a TDS-related diploma thesis; the detailed research question, deliverables, and evaluation criteria remain to be defined together