Dr. Khalid Abess // breaking systems
to build safer ones.

By day, I diagnose patients. By night — and honestly, most of the in-between hours too — I diagnose networks. I'm a doctor who fell hard for cybersecurity somewhere in the middle of medical school and never looked back. What started as a hobby to unwind between rotations turned into a full-blown obsession: late nights on CTFs instead of Netflix, home-lab builds instead of sleep, and a growing shelf of certifications earned entirely on the side.

I'm equally at home on both sides of the fight. On the red team, I enjoy taking systems apart to understand exactly how they break — probing for the overlooked misconfiguration, the unpatched service, the logic flaw everyone else scrolled past. On the blue team, I take that same knowledge and put it to work defending, hardening, and building things that are secure by default. My interests sit right at the intersection of network security, penetration testing, and secure software development.

Medicine taught me discipline, calm under pressure, and how to work through a problem methodically until you find the root cause. Cybersecurity gave me a second obsession to apply all of that to. I'm currently looking for opportunities where I can grow as a security practitioner while helping a team ship things that are secure by default.