Hi, I'm Sanket, a PhD student in Physics and lasers who spends a lot of time diving into the world of cybersecurity.
While my doctoral work involves opto-mechanics and nanosecond lasers for building cutting-edge microscopes, I really enjoy and dedicate significant time to learning about Cybersecurity and Cyber Threat Intelligence.
As a cyber threat intel aficionado, I spend a lot of my free time exploring new courses available across the internet in cybersecurity and developing Python-based tools for both learning and personal use. My strengths lie in data analysis, automation, and tackling novel problems.
I'm always learning and looking for ways to apply my technical skills to help make the digital world a bit more secure.
Portfolio
Cybersecurity and Python Projects
Projects I've worked on and off during my PhD in my free time.
Comprehensive step-by-step guide on setting up your personal MISP instance on a cloud compute machine. Covers everything from server provisioning to enabling threat intelligence feeds.
Successfully qualified The National Abacus & Mental Arithmetic and Mathematics Test conducted by International Abacus Mathematics Association
Research Scholarship
Proud recipient of SAGNIK ASIS RAY SCHOLARSHIP for biological research
Mental Math
Qualified Advance Level Of Mental Math Arithmetic Course
Sports & Leadership
Squash Ranking
Ranked 34th (out of 6600+ players) in All India Men's Squash Ranking by Squash Racket Federation of India (SRFI)
Inter-IIT Sports Meet
Captained the team to the Silver Medal in the Squash Championship during the Inter-IIT Sports Meet 2019
Tournament Victories
Led the team to Victory in Squash Championship, in Spardha' 2018, and Udghosh' 2019
State Level Achievements
Achieved 3rd place in Uttar Pradesh squash opens and 5th place in Maharashtra state squash opens
Sports Scholarship
Proud recipient of Sports scholarship by Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur for outstanding performance in Squash
Short Bio
Where am I in my journey?
Be Part
Of the
Story!
Future with you?
I'm keeping an open mind about where my future takes me, but
if you think I would be a great fit for your team, company or project, let me
know! I'd love the chance to talk with you. Feel free to also send cat
pictures, I always appreciate those. For opportunities and cat related
enquiries, there's a button right below.
2022 to Beyond!
As PhD goes
To nurture my passion for building awesome super-resolution microscopes that can revolutionize science, I decided to start my PhD in Optophysics and Engineering. This feels like one of the best decisions that I have made in my life.
Here we do awesome science and we are extremely motivated to solve any challenge that comes our way. A further plus point is that everybody in the group is friendly and it feels like a family to work with.
2021-2022
Mastering 'Things'
Afterwards, I was amazed by the power of deep learning so much that I decided to undertake a Masters degree in this field at IIT Kanpur. My aim was to bring a more logical approach to the image processing pipeline of biological imaging data such that it can be more accessible to common folk without needing black magic-like skills.
During my time at IIT, I was fortunate to build a custom super-resolution microscope from scratch. An experience that changed my perspective towards what I want to do for my PhD.
2017-2021
Engineer!
I was accepted by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, following high school and moved there in August 2017 to embark on the next stage of my journey - a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences and Bio-Engineering.
I felt like a deity; combining the knowledge of electronics with cell biology was like exploring the universe at a pixel level. I was fortunate enough to be able to use different microscopes and see life at a nano level. Then deep learning gave me the power to make computers work without me working, and now the sky is the only limit.
2005-2017
The Story Begins
I was a student at Kendriya Vidyalaya in Maharashtra,
India; progressing to join the Higher Secondary Education (HSE) programme. All
of the IB subjects I took, except languages and literature, were taught in
English. My high-level elective classes were Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I selected
Electronic engineering as my elective during the +2 degree.
Extras
What I like to do!!
Apart from studies and programming, I enjoy most of my time in sports. I like playing Squash, and I was the Captain of the Institute Squash Team. I enjoy playing Football, Badminton, and Table Tennis.
When forced indoors, I follow Football across the world and play video games. I am an aspiring Cyber Security professional (mostly a cyber threat intel aficionado), and I spend a lot of my free time exploring new courses available across the internet and the latest technology advancements in computer hardware and cybersecurity.
I also enjoy reading about the latest in threat analysis, TTPs of evolving groups, and novel attack vectors used by them. For me it's fun to look into how the threat landscape evolves and how the tools and techniques are used to combat them.
Analyzing and monitoring DNS data of a domain is also a challenging task. DNS data is complex and requires a deep understanding of DNS protocols and
the latest security threats. DNS protocol has so many facets that it becomes hard to remember what has been configured and what is missing.
At times, people tend to forget to configure or update the DNS records, which can lead to security threats such as DNS hijacking, subdomain takeover, Email Spoofing/Interception, etc.
So I decided to build a tool that can analyze the DNS data of a domain and provide a report with the latest security threats and recommendations to fix them.
This tool is developed in Python using Streamlit and is hosted on Google Cloud Platform.
It is a user-friendly web-based tool that can be used by anyone without the need to understand or learn Python to analyze the DNS data of a domain.
It is designed to provide as detailed information regarding various types of DNS records and their current configurations for a given domain.
I planned it in such a way that it can be used by both blue and red team security professionals.
I like to understand and play with DNS resolvers and the protocol, So this was a fun project to work on for me. This was the first time I used Google Cloud Platform
to host my web application directly. Although the website is hosted on the free tier of Google App Engine, it is still a great experience for any user to use it.
I also learned a lot in depth about the DNS protocol and the latest security threat landscape using DNS. Overall, it was a great experience to work on this project and hope people find it useful.
ThreatHarvester - IOC Aggregator
Cyber Threat Intelligence, Python, IOC enrichment, API Integration
Demo of ThreatHarvester tool showing IOC enrichment and aggregation using local DB check and API calls
I am relatively new to the field of cyber security and threat intelligence.
I like the field of cyber threat intelligence and I found out about it during one the SANS training courses and Flare trainigs.
Since then I am continuously learning and understanding the basics of threat intelligence. I find it very fascinating and I like to play with IOCs and indicators of compromise.
While I was learning about threat intelligence and fiddling with IOCs, I understood that there are many resources for getting the IOCs. However it is very tedious to analyze one by one on each website and resource.
So I thought of building a tool for searching and aggregating the IOCs from various resources and websites using a single command line interface.
It is a CLI tool completely written in Python. It uses a local DB to store the IOCs and a set of APIs to get the IOCs from various resources and websites.
The tool accepts IOCs as input and returns the aggregated results from various resources and websites. IOC can be a domain, IP, MD5, SHA1, SHA256, etc.
It also allows the user to turn on/off the sources and resources to get the IOCs from for more granular control. However this project does require at least starting knowledge of Python.
This project started out of sheer interest in the field of cyber threat intelligence and now has become somewhat of a passion for me.
I am working on it during my free time and will be adding more features to it in the future. I hope it will be useful for others as it is useful for me.
Web-hosted Personal MISP Instance
Threat Intelligence, MISP, Malware Analysis, Web hosting
Well this one was a fun project. It started as one of the resources that I needed for the ThreatHarvester project.
But then I quickly realized that MISp registrations are blocked and the only way forward was to make my own server.
I almost gave up on the idea, but then I found out that I can host my own MISP instance on a cloud server.
After Looking around I found out about Hetzner and their affordable cloud servers (for a student like me).
So I decided to go for Hetzner Compute server and host my MISP instance on it. I started looking into the documentation and requirements for hosting the MISP instance and found out that I would need somewhat of a knowledge Apache web server.
So with the help of the official documentation and some google searches, trial and error, some AI help (mostly for Apache configs), and a lot of head-banging, I was able to host my MISP instance on the cloud server.
For fun I also configured a custom domian using Cloudflare for my MISP instance. I also configured a custom SSL/TLS certificate for HTTPS of my domain using Let's Encrypt.
And finally for the feeds, I selected the ones that are most relevant to me and my interest in Cyber Threat Intelligence. It was a fun experience through I was able to learn a lot about the MISP and the threat intelligence field.
I am also planning to integrate this into the ThreatHarvester project and make it a more useful tool for the community.
