whoami

I wasn't born into cybersecurity, but I grew up online. My dad was one of the first network engineers in Romania, though as a kid I was more interested in running game servers than understanding network packets. A few years ago, at 25, I realized I wanted to do more than just use technology—I wanted to understand how it actually works. That's what led me to offensive security.

Looking back, there were early signs. At 10, I had to figure out how to recover my stolen Steam account from a persistent scammer. At 15, I helped a friend get back his €10,000 account after his PC was compromised and his data stolen. I still remember how unsettling it was watching the attacker communicate with us through CMD.

I was always the kid who reinstalled Windows for people, found ways around software restrictions, and did well in computer class. My family jokingly called me their "tech wizard," and I once had a stranger tell me I had "hacker's fingers"—an oddly specific comment that stuck with me.

These days, I find myself genuinely excited by concepts like kernel-level programming, bare-metal systems, and binary analysis. There's something satisfying about stripping away layers of abstraction to see the underlying logic. After spending most of my life in front of screens, I'm finally learning not just how to use the tools, but how they're built.