Finding weaknesses before attackers do.
Hunting critical vulnerabilities. Playing CTFs. Hardening what attackers actually target.
Recent writeups & research
A rolling log of what I am reading, breaking, and hardening.
What I dig into
The recurring themes behind most of my writing and engineering work.
Active Directory Security
Tiering, delegation models, Kerberos hygiene, and detecting common AD misconfigurations before they become incidents.
Attack Surface Reduction
Killing legacy protocols, restricting management planes, and shrinking what is reachable to what is necessary.
Printer Security
Hardening multi-function devices and print servers in segmented enterprise and OT environments.
TLS Hardening
Cipher suite curation, certificate lifecycle, and getting recovery and admin portals to a defensible posture.
BitLocker Security
Key protector strategy, recovery workflows, MBAM/BitLocker policy gaps, and tamper-resistant deployments.
OT Security
Working with IT/OT seams, Purdue model boundaries, and pragmatic controls in low-tolerance environments.
Things I build & maintain
Practical tooling that comes out of the day-to-day work.
AutoSecOps
Opinionated pipeline that runs IaC, container, and secrets scanning on every PR and posts a single signal-to-noise report.
Security Lab
Reproducible attack/defense lab: AD forest, Linux estate, vulnerable web apps, and replayable telemetry.
Hardening Scripts
Idempotent PowerShell and Bash baselines for Windows servers, workstations, and common Linux distros.
Abdelkader Notes — my public cybersecurity knowledge base
Web security techniques, CTF lessons, bug bounty methodology, hardening notes, payloads, and real-world security research.
Working on something at the seam of attack and defense?
Always interested in research collaborations, hardening engagements, and CTF crews.