About

About

I’m Avery Hughes, a security engineer and analyst finishing a B.S. in Cybersecurity at Indiana Institute of Technology (May 2027). I like building the infrastructure, then figuring out how to break it, then writing down how to stop that from happening.

This blog is where I put malware writeups, homelab builds, and notes from things I’m working on.

What I do

Security Analyst, Indiana Cyber Network Security assessments for clients across the defense industrial base, manufacturing, local government, education, and nonprofit sectors. I investigate findings, tailor testing to compliance needs like NIST SP 800-53 and FedRAMP, work with client IT teams on fixes, and present results to leadership.

Security Engineering, DMA Building a malware analysis lab (CAPEv2, FLARE VM, REMnux), managing CrowdStrike Falcon EDR and automating it with FalconPy and Ansible, and running vulnerability management pipelines out of GitLab’s security tooling.

Competitions

  • Indiana Tech Cyber Warriors: team captain for a 20+ member competitive team, leading Unix and team-wide training
  • National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC): national appearance
  • Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC): 2x appearance
  • CTFs on the side, mostly web exploitation, binary exploitation, and malware analysis

Projects

  • ClassCloud: a Python/Flask web platform with SSO, published through Cloudflare Tunnel
  • Homelab: Proxmox cluster with an OPNsense router, segmented VLANs, HAProxy with wildcard TLS, and NetBird for remote access. Most of what I write about gets tested here first
  • Senior project: an autonomous malware analysis lab in Azure that detonates samples in throwaway VMs and uses an LLM to draft the analysis report

Toolbox

  
SecurityCrowdStrike Falcon, Splunk, Wazuh, Arctic Wolf
Malware analysisCAPEv2, FLARE VM, REMnux
ComplianceNIST SP 800-53, FedRAMP
InfrastructureProxmox, Kubernetes (k3s), Docker, OPNsense, AWS, Azure
AutomationPython, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD

Get in touch