A LITTLE ABOUT ME

Curious about the whole attack surface.

I’m Karthik — a cybersecurity engineer in Hyderabad working across network defense, application security, incident response, cloud infrastructure, connected devices and AI-assisted threat research. Email security is part of my day-to-day experience—not the limit of my security interests.

THE APPROACH

Security from the packet to the platform.

My foundation is cybersecurity, and my curiosity doesn’t stop at one specialty. I explore application and API security, vulnerability testing, incident response, digital forensics, threat intelligence, network detection, wireless threats, cloud security, secure infrastructure and cryptography.

My enterprise role at LTIMindtree has deepened my hands-on security-operations experience through Microsoft Defender XDR and Microsoft Defender for Office 365. I investigate suspicious activity, analyze evidence with KQL and message traces, and help make the response clearer and more useful.

Across Go and Python tools, Linux infrastructure, Raspberry Pi prototypes, encryption experiments, distributed intrusion detection and AI-assisted investigations, one idea ties my work together: build defense with evidence, human judgment and sound engineering—not hype.

WHERE I’VE WORKED

A path across security and engineering.

10.2025 — NOW

Cyber Security Analyst · LTIMindtree

Investigate phishing, business email compromise, malicious URLs, suspicious attachments and identity anomalies using Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, KQL and message tracing. Analyze SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC and threat indicators; document findings, support detection tuning and build Python automation for IOC enrichment and investigation tasks.

03.2022 — 05.2025

Backend Engineer & Open Source Contributor · Swecha

Developed Go and Python services for backend applications, vulnerability intelligence and security automation. Built concurrent CVE and vendor-advisory collectors using goroutines, worker pools and structured data pipelines; contributed to APIs, Linux tools, containerized services and collaborative open-source development.

08.2024 — 04.2025

SOC / Security Intern · Ideathon Axis

Supported SIEM monitoring, network-security investigations, IDS/IPS analysis, alert triage, IOC validation, incident documentation and security-event correlation.

EDUCATION

A strong technical foundation.

12.2021 — 05.2025

Bachelor of Technology · Cyber Security

Vignana Bharathi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad · CGPA: 7.7/10

THE TOOLKIT

Technical skills & certifications.

01 · OPERATIONS

Cybersecurity operations & incident response

SOC monitoring, SIEM investigations, incident triage, escalation, digital-forensics fundamentals, event correlation, log analysis, IOC enrichment and analyst runbooks.

Microsoft Defender XDRMicrosoft SentinelWazuhELKKQLDetection engineering

02 · APPLICATION SECURITY

Web, API & application defense

OWASP Top 10, vulnerability assessment, secure API design, CSRF defenses, upload security, threat modeling, secure SDLC and CI/CD security testing.

Burp SuiteNessusOWASP ZAPPlaywrightSeleniumVAPT

03 · NETWORK & WIRELESS

Network security & threat detection

Traffic investigation and analysis, IDS/IPS, wireless-security concepts, routing, firewalls, VPNs, TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S and adversary-in-the-network indicators.

WiresharkNmapScapyZeekSuricataWIDS

04 · CLOUD & DEVSECOPS

Secure cloud & systems engineering

Cloud services, identity and access management, container security, policy-driven deployments, Linux hardening, CI/CD, fleet automation and infrastructure as code.

AWSAzureGCPDockerKubernetesTerraformOPAGitLab CI

05 · THREAT INTELLIGENCE

Threat hunting & vulnerability intelligence

CVE and vendor-advisory collection, indicator validation, attack-surface awareness, malware-scanning workflows, reputation checks and risk-informed prioritization.

CVE enrichmentVulnerability scannersMITRE ATT&CKDNS / WHOISURL intelligence

06 · AI SECURITY & R&D

AI, ML, LLMs & emerging defense

Agentic investigation, retrieval-augmented generation, NLP, anomaly detection, embedding-based retrieval, model-tuning experiments and human-guided automated response.

PyTorchscikit-learnTransformersLangChainFAISSLoRA experimentsMCP

07 · IOT & EMBEDDED SECURITY

Connected devices & physical security

Raspberry Pi and sensor-based systems, face-recognition access-control prototypes, wireless defense and architecture ideas for edge and decentralized intrusion detection.

Raspberry PiPythonComputer visionEdge securityWireless IDS

08 · CRYPTOGRAPHY & PRIVACY

Applied cryptography & secure identity

Symmetric/asymmetric encryption, RSA-OAEP, hashes, digital signatures, TLS, PKI, JWT and secure key exchange; ongoing exploration of post-quantum cryptography.

RSA-OAEPPKI / TLSJWTSecure messagingPost-quantum concepts

09 · DEVELOPMENT

Programming & backend engineering

Concurrent collectors, REST APIs, microservices, streaming systems, security automation and relational, document and vector-database-backed applications.

GoPythonTypeScriptJavaScriptSQLC / C++BashPowerShellSwift

10 · EMAIL SECURITY

Email investigation & identity protection

A strong professional specialty within my broader security practice: phishing and BEC investigations, message tracing, header analysis, authentication, containment and detection tuning.

Defender for Office 365SPFDKIMDMARCARCSafe Links

EARNED CREDENTIALS

Certifications & professional training.

Security, networking & development

Certified Network Security Practitioner (CNSP)
Certified Phishing Prevention Specialist (CPPS)
JNCIA — Juniper Networks
Developing Secure Software — Linux Foundation
Linux Foundation LFD121

Cloud & platform credentials

Zscaler Cloud Associate
ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA)
ServiceNow Certified Application Developer (CAD)

A PROUD MILESTONE

Recognition for a big idea.

Third Prize · National Techno-Exhibition 2025

Recognized for the Adaptive Threat Response Orchestrator (ATRO), a multi-agent cyber-defense project bringing together threat analysis, security evidence and analyst-facing response guidance.

Take a closer look at ATRO

PUBLICATIONS & COMMUNITY

Sharing what I’m learning.

PUBLISHED ON MEDIUM · AI SECURITY

Adaptive Threat Response Orchestrator (ATRO)

A published technical article about AI-assisted threat detection, multi-agent cyber-defense orchestration and automated incident response.

Search Medium for the published ATRO article

PROFESSIONAL NETWORK

Continue the conversation.

Connect on LinkedIn, explore both of my public GitHub profiles, or share an idea about a security problem we should solve.

Connect on LinkedIn ↗Security & AI · @Karthikkkunal ↗Platforms & Systems · @karthikkunal ↗Search Medium for my article ↗

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Questions I’m still exploring.

DEFENSE AT THE EDGE

Distributed intrusion detection

How do edge devices, anomaly detection and trusted nodes make security monitoring more resilient and useful?

CRYPTOGRAPHY TOMORROW

Post-quantum security

How do lattice-, code- and hash-based cryptographic approaches support future secure protocols?

HUMAN-CENTERED AI

Responsible security automation

Where can RAG and security agents meaningfully assist analysts—and how do we make their evidence and limits visible?