BEN HAMMOUDA NOUR — Security Engineer

About

Security engineer focused on offensive operations, vulnerability research, and AI security. I work across the full attack chain, from initial recon through exploitation, post-exploitation, and responsible disclosure.

Hands-on experience securing e-commerce platforms against OWASP Top 10 threats, conducting red team engagements to domain admin, and building custom tooling for threat intelligence and C2 infrastructure. Active HackerOne/Bugcrowd researcher with a track record of responsible disclosure to major platforms.

When I'm not breaking things, I'm reverse engineering them, or writing about why they broke. My reporting is built the same way: an executive summary a decision-maker can act on, findings an engineer can reproduce, and unverified evidence labeled honestly instead of quietly merged.

Focus Network Engineering · Offensive Security · AI Sec

Education B.S. Information & Communication Technologies

Competitions IEEEXtreme 18.0 · HTB · TryHackMe · CSTAM

Platforms HackerOne · Bugcrowd · HTB

GitHub github.com/hireblackout

Status ● Open to work

Experience

Principal AI Security Engineer · Agentic Systems & Pipeline Reliability

OliveSoft · RFP Intelligence & Bid Engineering Pipeline · Remote

2026

Architected the LLM security stack: implemented egress-guarded HTTP clients to mitigate SSRF and data exfiltration, established a quarantined research LLM environment (tool-less, strict-JSON sandbox) to contain indirect prompt injection, and enforced least-privilege read-only MCP access for agents. Remediated audit-forgery and credential-scrubbing vulnerabilities.
Engineered a high-assurance proposal generation layer using a verification-first architecture. Decoupled claim generation from evidence validation; a secondary judge model validates all factual assertions (metrics, entities, fiscal data) against source material, enforcing a no-bid threshold for insufficient grounding.
Hardened RAG retrieval and reliability contracts via robust error envelopes, idempotent merge-on-update ingestion pipelines, and single-flight research caching. Directed the dependency vulnerability lifecycle (e.g., pypdf upstream remediation) integrated with static analysis (gitleaks, bandit) and dependency hardening.
Conducted red-team validation of LLM control surfaces mapped against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications to verify defensive posture.

Open Source Security Contributor

caveman (JuliusBrussee, 74.9k stars) · Independent Security Audit & Upstream Fix · Remote

Discovered a critical integrity vulnerability in caveman's compression-validation pipeline: inline backtick spans were silently dropped during compression, so every compressed output could pass validation with its data corrupted. Nothing else in the pipeline caught it.
Built validate_inline_codes(), a Counter-based diff validator with 11 unit tests, and drove the fix through code review and merge via PR #309. The validator now acts as the integrity gate for the whole compression pipeline.
Identified and fixed is_sensitive_path() false positives that blocked documentation files with security-related names (e.g., password_policy.md, secrets_management_guide.md). Introduced a _DOC_EXTENSIONS allowlist with 23 test cases, submitted via PR #308.

OWASP Nettacker

OWASP Foundation · Vulnerability Detection Engineering · Remote

Designed a YAML detection module for CVE-2024-0012 (PAN-OS auth bypass, CVSS 9.3, CISA KEV). The module exploits Nginx path confusion, injecting X-PAN-AUTHCHECK: off via /php/ztp_gate.php/.js.map to fingerprint unpatched PAN-OS management interfaces. Matching two conditions (HTTP 200 plus the ZTP title) rules out false positives against patched and non-target hosts. Submitted via PR #1444 with 5 test scenarios.

E-Commerce Security Specialist

Lumia · Platform Security Hardening · Remote

Summer 2025

Hardened Lumia's e-commerce platform in layers: an OWASP-driven WAF ruleset, enforced TLS 1.3, and an OAuth 2.0 + JWT auth framework. Cut the attack surface by roughly 70% across 50+ remediated findings (SQLi, XSS, privilege escalation).
Ran penetration tests and vulnerability assessments and closed out the high-risk exposures across the application and infrastructure layers.

Cybersecurity Consultant

Contract Security Engagements · Web Application Security (Remote)

2024 · Present

Delivered offensive security across 15+ e-commerce platforms: red team engagements that reached domain admin through multi-stage privilege escalation chains, and pre-production assessments that closed 50+ critical findings (SQLi, XSS, IDOR).
Built the client base on delivered results: repeat engagements and referrals kept it going.

Ben HammoudaNour.

Ben Hammouda
Nour.