When I was 14 years old, I began teaching myself to code in the midst of a global pandemic. I was curious about how the ubiquitious technology of my childhood actually worked. Fast-forward 3 software engineering internships, I learned the concept of cybersecurity. Particularly, I was fascinated by the idea of being able to use a set of rules in a way that caused the very behavior they were enacted to prevent. This mirrored the strategy games that I pored over as a child.
I made a discovery that few adolescents make so early on: I knew what I wanted to do with my future. And that was cybersecurity, specifically specializations that are investigative in nature. The rest is history.
At the age of 16- I became one of the youngest people globally to earn the OSCP and negotiated my way into an 8-week, red team internship doing offensive security operations in the municipal enterprise environment of the City of Bakersfield.
At the age of 17- I discovered 8 CVEs, became the youngest Synack Red Team Security Researcher, and performed Chevron-sponsored academic research on parallel processing in GPUs, developing my own CUDA kernel.
At the age of 18… I aim to continue on the trajectory I’ve been fortunate enough to experience, honing my technical skills, and continuing to ask questions that lead to new discoveries.