$ whoami
Cyber defense competition team captain · 1st at Palmetto (2024, 2026) · NSA Codebreaker 8/8 · security operations center analyst · computer network operations intern · automotive security researcher
Hi — I'm Nick. I'm a computer science grad student at Clemson who learned cyber the hard way: competition weekends defending live networks from red teams, late nights reversing malware in Binary Ninja for the NSA Codebreaker Challenge, and thousands of real alerts on shift in a university security operations center.
cyberfromscratch is the path I wish I'd had — written for everyone from my grandparents to the students I've captained.
1st
Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition 2024 & 2026, as team captain
2 yrs
on shift as a security operations center (SOC) analyst
8/8
National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenge tasks solved
CNO
computer network operations (CNO) development intern at Nightwing
$ ls ~/wins
Reverse engineered an attacker's custom network protocol from packet captures, took apart malware in Binary Ninja to recover command-and-control (C2) indicators, and found a hidden rootkit in memory dumps with Volatility.
Clemson Cybersecurity Club
Captained a 7-person blue team — 1st at the Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition (2024, 2026), 3rd (2024, 2026) and 4th (2025) at the Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition — set a team record for incident reports in one competition, and designed the training curriculum on hardening, incident response, and business injects.
$ ls ~/work
Clemson University Cybersecurity Operations Center
Mapped and vulnerability-scanned university networks with Nmap and Nessus; automated a WireGuard virtual private network (VPN, via wg-easy) so the team could reach its vSphere lab securely.
Nightwing
Trained in reverse engineering through RET2 Systems (x86-64 binary analysis, memory corruption, exploitation); built EC2-to-CloudWatch log forwarding with Telegraf in LocalStack and a FastAPI + Next.js ticketing system.
Clemson University Cybersecurity Operations Center
Triaged 2,500+ alerts in Splunk and the Elastic Stack, handled 1,000+ phishing attempts with Abnormal Security, and shadowed Clemson's chief information security officer (CISO) to learn governance, risk, and strategy.
Clemson University
Built features for a youth-centered Sudoku platform in PHP and JavaScript, and designed its database, account system, and avatar creator.
Clemson Computing & Information Technology
Diagnosed hardware and software issues for university administrators and worked a ticket queue.
$ ls ~/projects
Clemson ACE-Cyber, with an industry mentor
Led a 4-person team building a pipeline from a high-performance computing cluster to Amazon Web Services (AWS) where Llama 3.3 70B writes PowerShell fixes for the Defense Information Systems Agency's security technical implementation guides (DISA STIGs), graded by real compliance scans.
TigerSec Lab
Emulated Android Automotive environments, analyzed their network traffic in Wireshark, explored controller area network (CAN) bus injection and fuzzing, and helped build a web app that automates Android app (APK) analysis and deobfuscation.
$ ls ~/school
Clemson University
Graduate coursework in emerging-systems security, usable privacy & security, and the ACE-Cyber capstone.
Clemson University
Helped organize Clemson's student hackathon.
Clemson University (Honors College)
Graduated with a 3.85 GPA.
$ cat ~/.toolbox
$ cat why.md
Most cyber training is either too shallow to matter or too dense to start. I wanted one place where anyone can begin — and keep going all the way to reverse engineering and malware analysis — with hands-on practice at every step and honest opinions about the best way to learn each thing.
Captaining a Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) team taught me that the people who win aren't the ones who know the most commands. They're the ones who stay calm, document everything, and can explain what happened to someone who isn't technical. That's built into every lesson here.