$ whoami

Breaking things carefully,
so they don't break in production.

I run a small security practice, spend too much time inside terminals, and write here about the infrastructure I build, the systems I take apart, and the projects in between.

What I actually do

I'm Adel — I run a cybersecurity practice out of ciberdefensa.uk, working across red teaming, penetration testing, and incident response for clients who'd rather find their weak points before someone else does.

Outside client work, I'm usually neck-deep in a Linux box somewhere, provisioning cloud infrastructure, or fixing something I broke the night before. This site is where the smaller, more personal version of that work lives.

01

Offensive security

Red team engagements, penetration testing, and adversary simulation — finding the path an attacker would actually take, not just the checklist.

02

Cloud & infrastructure

Hands-on Linux and cloud work — provisioning, hardening, and occasionally rebuilding infrastructure on OCI after I've broken it myself.

03

Threat intel & response

Digital forensics, incident response, and zero trust architecture — the unglamorous side of keeping systems standing after something goes wrong.

Blog

Scrutiny: SMART Drive Monitoring on Proxmox with a Hub-Spoke LXC

Setting up Scrutiny for SMART drive monitoring on Proxmox: an unprivileged LXC hub running the dashboard and InfluxDB, a collector on the host itself, and Telegram alerts before a disk actually dies.

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Recovering an OCI boot volume after an accidental termination

What happens when you terminate the wrong instance on Oracle Cloud, and the boot volume swap trick that saved an Alpine Linux Ampere A1 box.

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VideoOut: from an Android intent hack to a cross-platform extension

How a small Android app for shoving videos into an external player turned into a Firefox extension with a native messaging host.

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Zero trust isn't a product, it's a habit

Notes from client engagements on the difference between buying a zero trust solution and actually changing how a team verifies every request.

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Monitoring my Proxmox environment and automated actions with AI

Deploying rcourtman/Pulse on Docker in my Oracle OCI Alpine box, wiring it up to Proxmox with a scoped API token, and turning on Patrol with OpenRouter as the brain.

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Monitoring my Proxmox environment and automated actions with AI

A small Python pipeline that turns a PDF bank statement into categorized, readable spending summaries, without a third-party finance app.

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Alpine, OpenRC, and the services nobody warns you about

Short field notes on managing services with OpenRC on Alpine Linux, coming from a systemd-shaped mental model.

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¿ZFS on consumer SSDs? Why you should avoid it and how to save your hardware

Proxmox ZFS on consumer SSDs: why it can be a disaster and how to protect your drives.

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Current Projects

now Reading through the Horus Heresy catalogue, in publication order this time in progress
now Tinkering with a home Alpine Linux setup on spare hardware ongoing
2026 Built a Warhammer 40k reading tracker web app, sorted by era and reading status shipped
2025 Packaged Amazon Music as a Flatpak for Linux, Widevine DRM included shipped