"I hack things legally, build things chaotically, and explain cybersecurity
like we're just two friends messing with a home lab at 2 AM."
$ whoami
karthikeya@blue-team:~$ id
uid=1337(karthikeya) gid=1337(security) groups=1337(security),100(builders),200(students)
> Cybersecurity (BS to MS) at Eastern Michigan University · GPA 3.82 · Dean's List
> Incoming Information Security Engineer Intern @ Rocket Mortgage · Summer 2026
> Penetration Tester (Contract) @ General Motors · Feb–May 2026
> VP, Google Developer Student Club @ EMU · 8x hackathon winnerI spend my time between three places: a Proxmox home lab running pfSense, Wazuh, Splunk, and an AD forest I'm constantly breaking and re-hardening; a terminal full of Burp Suite tabs for bug bounty and CTF work; and a YouTube studio where I try to make all of that make sense to people just starting out.
- 🔬 Building
Aghora— a privacy-first local malware analysis platform with AI triage, Ghidra decompilation, and an interactive threat graph - 🛡️ Detection engineering on my SOC lab — writing Wazuh rules and Splunk searches mapped to MITRE ATT&CK
- 🎯 Prepping for OSCP and HTB CPTS · sharpening AD attack paths with BloodHound and Impacket
- 🎥 Recording walkthroughs of home lab builds, CTF challenges, and pentest methodology on YouTube
- 📬 Open to offensive security, detection engineering, and AI security conversations
🔬 AghoraPrivacy-first local malware analysis with AI triage A full-stack analysis platform that never sends a sample off your box. Static PE parsing, entropy and DIE packer detection, headless Ghidra decompilation, local LLM triage via Gemma + Ollama, and an interactive 6-cluster threat graph for IOC pivoting.
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Enterprise SOC and malware analysis environment Proxmox-hosted lab with an Active Directory forest, Windows/Linux endpoints, FlareVM for malware work, and pfSense segmentation. Wazuh + Splunk + ELK for detection engineering, Python alerting automation, Authentik SSO, and WireGuard on a Raspberry Pi as the entry point.
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I run a cybersecurity channel where I walk through home lab builds, CTF challenges, and the kind of "okay but why does this work" explanations I wish existed when I was starting out.
"Subscribe before your firewall gets jealous."
- 🥇 1st Place CTF — GrizzHacks 8 (3,300 points · Best Use of Gemini API)
- 🇺🇸 9th Place Nationally — IEEE National Coding Competition 2024
- 🏅 8x Hackathon Winner
- 🎤 Speaker — ISC² Detroit Chapter (April 28, 2026)
- 👥 Vice President — Google Developer Student Club, EMU (co-founded EMU's first official chapter)
- 📈 30% reduction in TA support tickets via troubleshooting guides I wrote, now used across EMU's cybersecurity program