I build websites, and I defend networks.

I’m Colin, a third-year cybersecurity student focused on blue-team defense, system analysis, and forensics, with a background in network administration. I’ve also spent the last five years as a freelance web developer, taking on the projects that need something a template can’t do.

Those two halves aren’t separate. Defending systems taught me how they actually fail: a misconfigured server, a forgotten admin account, a plugin nobody updated. Building websites is where I get to prevent those failures before anyone has to respond to them.

The competition record

With my team, I’ve won the Minnesota state Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) two years in a row. In CCDC, student teams take over a small business network full of problems. We keep its services running and handle business requests while a professional red team attacks it in real time.

It rewards what clients need from a developer, too: staying calm under pressure, documenting as you go, and fixing the right thing first. I’m part of the SCSU Cyber Competition Club, where we train for it.

What I work with

About the name

Yes, it says black hat. In security, that’s the attacker. My work is on the other side, the blue team. But you can’t defend what you don’t understand, so I learn how things get broken before I decide how to build them.

Also building

I’m co-developing Helldesk with a small student team: an IT support sim where you run the help desk for Hell, and every ticket is a real networking or hardware problem.