I'm Alex.
I've spent eleven years in IT, with the last eight focused on cybersecurity. The kind where your phone rings at 2 AM and you spend the next six hours piecing together what happened from DNS logs, memory dumps, and packet captures.
Before that, I was disarming bombs in the Army. Turns out "stay calm, think methodically, don't touch the wrong thing" translates pretty well to incident response.
I've worked DFIR and threat hunting for the Air Force, first on the watch floor as I advanced to senior analyst and the last-tier escalation point, now actively hunting threats across the enterprise. I run our EDR platform. I build detection logic. I dig through the telemetry when something doesn't look right. I've also led a team of 18 analysts, but I'll be honest, I'd rather be the one digging through the logs than managing the people who dig through the logs.
What I actually enjoy is the investigation itself. An alert fires or something looks off in a hunt. You start pulling threads, correlating log sources, tracing process trees, mapping lateral movement, and you come out the other side with the full picture: who, what, where, when, why. Whether it's an actual intrusion, a misconfiguration, or just a network hiccup, that process of turning noise into signal is the part I never get tired of.
Off the clock, I self-host everything I reasonably can, mess with software and hardware configurations I probably should leave alone, and run ewephoriathreat.com, a satire cybersecurity news site where an automated pipeline rewrites real articles as sheep puns from the "EwePhoria Threat Analytics" team.
I built the site you're on now because I like making things and because https443.com was available and I couldn't not buy it.
Infrastructure isn't theory to me. I host my own services, manage my own routing, and automate what I can. Here's what's running:
[ Internet ]
/ \
https443.com +------+------+
GitHub/Cloudflare | OPNSense FW |
Pages +------+------+
|
+--------------+--------------+
| | |
[ Tailscale ] [ Pi-Hole ] [ NGINX Proxy Manager]
Intranet VPN DNS Reverse Proxy
(Pi 4) (Pi 3B) |
+-------------+------------+
| |
[ Server/NAS ] ewephoriathreat.com
Custom hardware
mergerfs/snapraid array
10 drives (8+2)
|
+----------+-----------+---------+--------+----------+-----------+----------+
| | | | | | | |
Nextcloud Audio- Grafana Splunk Bookstack Photoprism Tandoor Bitwarden
bookshelf Prometheus Recipes
cAdvisor
Backblaze B2 --> Automated encrypted offsite backups
MXRoute --> Self managed email