// defending digital environments

Ayaan Ahmad

Cybersecurity practitioner since age six. I solve complex problems and safeguard digital environments — comfortable on both sides of the engagement.

ayaan@profile: ~
ayaan@profile:~$
Try typing help, whoami, projects, certs, or redteam / blueteam

01 About Me

Mission: solve complex problems and safeguard digital environments.

I've been passionate about cybersecurity since the age of six. Over the years, I've worked with several Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), where I gained invaluable experience and insights.

I'm deeply grateful to have chosen a field that allows me to make a meaningful impact — and I document everything I learn along the way so others can learn from it too.

ROLECybersecurity Specialist
EDUCATIONB.S. IT / Cybersecurity, NEIU '26
FOCUSRed + Blue Team
CURRENT_BUILDAzure SIEM Lab

02 Experience

Hands-on across security operations, cloud, and network engineering.

Cybersecurity Specialist — Physicians Revenue Group, Lisle, IL MAY 2023 – PRESENT

Cut org risk score 35% YoY via monthly red team engagements (20+ critical findings); deployed a custom Wazuh SIEM cutting MTTD 40% across 90+ endpoints; standardized IR with 15+ runbooks (50% fewer help desk tickets); raised patch rollout success from 77% to 99%+, saving $18K/yr.

Cloud & Network Engineer — Villa-Tech, Naperville, IL MAR 2022 – NOV 2022

Architected SDN-based hybrid cloud hitting 99.9% uptime across 3 sites (50+ nodes); cut WAN costs 30% across 5 branches with Silver Peak SD-WAN + Azure Virtual Hubs (P2S/S2S VPN); migrated to Azure with zero downtime across 200+ firewall policies.

Cybersecurity Intern — Villa-Tech, Glenview, IL JUN 2020 – SEP 2020

Hardened Checkpoint R80.10 across 30+ enterprise nodes, cutting firewall misconfigs 25%; built 8 Grafana dashboards across AWS and on-prem, eliminating 3+ hrs/week of manual compliance reporting.

03 CTF Writeups & Practice

I meticulously document and share insights from CTF challenges. Dissecting these challenges sharpens my own skills and serves as a resource for the cybersecurity community.

⚔ Offense / Red Team

Hack The Box

Where I practice Red Team CTFs — most boxes are black-box engagements. A realistic environment for penetration testing and learning how to exploit vulnerabilities.

→ View HTB profile
🛡 Defense / Blue Team

LetsDefend

Where I practice Blue Team CTFs — a simulated SOC environment for incident response and learning how to triage security alerts.

→ View LetsDefend profile

04 Current Project

Infrastructure as code meets digital forensics.

Azure SIEM Honeypot Lab

I've always wanted to learn Terraform and automate my infrastructure. This project deploys a complete honeypot environment in Azure — the entire environment is built with Terraform. Users can practice DFIR and writing detection queries.

$ terraform apply # that's all it takes
TerraformAzureSentinelHoneypotDFIRKQL
View on GitHub →

05 Certifications

Always leveling up.

[✓] AZ-700 — Azure Network Engineer Associate EARNED
[✓] EdgeConnect Sales Expert (ECSXA) EARNED
[✓] Silver Peak SD-WAN Professional EARNED
[✓] Checkpoint CCSA EARNED