about

I’m Haider. I break things for a living now, which still feels slightly unreal to write down.

I didn’t come into security through a degree or a bootcamp. I came in sideways: a machine on Hack The Box that I couldn’t stop thinking about, then another, then a weekend that disappeared into a CTF. At some point the curiosity turned into a habit, and the habit turned into a method. I learned by doing, getting stuck, reading other people’s writeups after the fact and figuring out what I’d missed.

That path is still how I work. I like understanding why something is vulnerable, not just that a payload fires. Most of what I’ve learned came from patient, slightly obsessive reading of HTTP traffic and source code, and from writing things down so I’d understand them properly the second time.

Today I work as a junior penetration tester in Groningen, triaging vulnerability reports and testing across several client programmes. Next to that I study HBO-ICT, and I build tools for the parts of the job that I think could be better.

This site is where I keep my writeups, notes and the things I make.