About

About

I’m Varad, a cybersecurity Master’s graduate from Northeastern University (May 2026). This site is my portfolio and notebook. HTB writeups, capstone work, research projects, and whatever I’m currently picking apart.

What this site is

A running record of what I learn by breaking things. Writeups for boxes I find interesting on Hack The Box. Project pages for the research and tooling I build outside of coursework, like the Two-Phase USB Attack on the Sony DualSense and an EMF side-channel inference experiment. The OT/IoT capstone, a Purdue-aware SIEM framework for IIoT networks sponsored by Cummins, is here.

What I do

My main specialization is network and host penetration testing. The CPTS lane: enumeration, exploitation, privesc, lateral movement, and writing up the chain at the end. I like breaking things and pushing systems to their limits, finding the failure modes their builders didn’t see coming. The capstone took that work into OT/IoT territory, and that’s becoming a real second specialty.

Beyond the technical side, I think security is a mindset before it’s a skillset. The same instinct that makes someone glance over their shoulder for a CCTV camera before unlocking their phone in public is the same instinct that catches a misconfigured Kerberos delegation in an Active Directory pentest. It’s a way of seeing systems, including the social and physical ones, as composed of trust boundaries that someone, somewhere, is going to test. Once you can’t turn that off, you don’t.

Credentials

  • eJPT
  • Hack The Box CPTS (in progress)
  • Hack The Box Academy: top 10% globally, 87+ targets compromised
  • MS Cybersecurity, Northeastern University, May 2026, GPA 3.6

Outside of all that

I lift, I cook, and I travel whenever the schedule allows.

I’m a sim racer. The hobby started as casual lapping and quickly became the thing I lose hours to without noticing. My taste leans heavily toward the V10 Audi R8 and the Ferrari 599XX Evo: cars that feel like they were built by people who cared, not committees who approved.

I’m also an audiophile, and that one needs a sentence of defense because the word gets misused. Music is probably the most universal form of art humans have made. Every civilisation we have records of made music before they made almost anything else, and I think that fact deserves more respect than it usually gets. We live in a digital age where the chain between artist and listener runs through a lot of hardware and software, and most of it quietly degrades what the artist actually committed to tape. Being an audiophile is just caring enough about that chain to hear what they intended. Master the bridge between artist and listener, and the rest follows.

Get in touch

Open to collaborations on offensive security, ICS/OT research, or any conversation about good music, the nordschliefe, or why most modern cars feel like appliances.