Gaurav Raj

(thehackersbrain) • Red Team Operator & Software Engineer

Red Team Operator, Offensive Security Researcher & Software Engineer. Specialized in low-level systems programming (C/ASM/Rust), Linux internals, kernel development, malware development, and red team operations. Strong crossover between kernel engineering, cloud infrastructure, and full-stack development.

Featured Projects

MalDev Wiki

An open knowledge base for malware research and wiki.

AstroMalware ResearchSecurityKnowledge Base

Berserk Arch Linux

A bleeding-edge, security-centric distro for hackers, developers, and nerds alike.

Arch LinuxLinuxCI/CDSystem DesignDevelopment

Vader LLM

A GPT-2-scale language model built from scratch transformer, and training loop etc, and instruction fine-tuning, all without pretrained checkpoints.

PythonPyTorchNLPTransformersLLMDL

See all projects →

Featured Writings

Book
June 20, 2026

Forged Trust: Offensive Operations against Active Directory Certificate Services

The definitive offensive reference for Active Directory Certificate Services. Documents the complete ADCS attack taxonomy from first principles — ESC1 through ESC18, THEFT1–THEFT5, PERSIST1–PERSIST3, and DPERSIST1–DPERSIST3. Covers exploitation walkthroughs, PKINIT internals, Shadow Credentials, KB5014754 enforcement, and detection opportunities.

Amazon

Active DirectoryADCSCertificate AbuseOffensive SecurityRed TeamWindows SecurityCertipyPKINITShadow Credentials
SoK Paper
June 17, 2026

Certificate of Compromise: Offensive Operations against ADCS - Whitepaper

Comprehensive technical reference for the complete ADCS attack taxonomy, ESC1-ESC18, THEFT1-THEFT5, PERSIST1-PERSIST3, and DPERSIST1-DPERSIST3. Covers the impact of KB5014754 binding enforcement.

Zenodo (Preprint) — arXiv cs.CR (pending endorsement)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20732733

Active DirectoryADCSCertificate AbuseOffensive SecurityRed TeamWindows SecurityCertipy

See all writings →

Featured In & Recognition

🏔️
BerserkArch DistroWatch Listing
BerserkArch auto-indexed on DistroWatch — the global registry tracking Linux distributions worldwide.
📺
Netflix - Gyeongseong Creature (S2E1)
HiddenWave audio steganography tool featured in netflix hacking series production for covert communication scenes. LSB encoding in WAV files used for cyber warfare visualization.
🎓
UCSB netUnicorn Research - Network Security ML Platform
Exploit development patterns and vulnerability research methodologies referenced in "In Search of netUnicorn" paper for ML-based network security experiments.
📄
IRJMETS Journal Vol. 7, Issue 5 (May 2025)
HiddenPNG and HiddenWave cited in "Steganography in Multimedia" paper (Ref [12]). LSB techniques, PIL/NumPy implementation, and cryptographic data concealment methods.