Hanna Nyzhnia
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This article is about the cybersecurity practitioner Hanna Nyzhnia. For other uses, see Hanna Nyzhnia (disambiguation).
| Residence | Barcelona, Spain |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Cybersecurity professional |
| Years active | 2021–present |
| Education | M.Sc. Cybersecurity |
| Alma mater | Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture |
| Specialties | Network security · Secure development · Cloud-native & DevSecOps |
| Certifications | ISC2 CC · CompTIA A+ & Network+ · Microsoft AZ-900 · Google Cybersecurity & IT Support |
| Languages | Ukrainian, English, Russian, Spanish (learning) |
| Website | nyzhnia.com |
Hanna Nyzhnia is a cybersecurity professional with over four years of experience and a Master of Science in Cybersecurity. Her work spans vulnerability assessment, security auditing, penetration testing and network security, with a growing focus on cloud-native security, DevSecOps pipelines and AI-assisted threat hunting.
She works across the stack, pairing offensive and defensive security with full-stack development and infrastructure engineering — from hardening Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines to building small tools and web applications.
Career and background
Early life and education
Nyzhnia was born and raised in Ukraine, where she lived until the age of 23. Influenced by the spy movies of her early life — children's films about spies in particular — she developed a lasting fascination with hackers and hacker culture. The interest deepened through internet mysteries such as Cicada 3301 and Kevin Mitnick's book on social engineering, which she describes as a good read, if rather unrealistic.[citation needed]
She trained at a web-application penetration testing bootcamp before beginning her Master of Science in Cybersecurity at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture in 2021. A few months into the degree, she took her first job in the field — as a cybersecurity consultant at KPMG in Kyiv (2021–2022), auditing banking-sector clients against ISO 27001/27002, NIST and VAIT. A few months after that, the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out.
Career
Nyzhnia then moved to the United States, where she spent two and a half years as a full-stack developer in startups — Mission Zero and Archilabs — building backend infrastructure serving thousands of concurrent users and becoming an early adopter of AI automation for CAD software. One of the startups was later picked up by Y Combinator — after she had already moved on. Alongside this she completed IT support and network administration programs at Per Scholas. She has since worked freelance from Barcelona, Spain, deepening her expertise in development, DevOps and DevSecOps. She is a frequent attendee of capture-the-flag (CTF) competitions and stays closely tuned to cybersecurity news.
As of 2026, her primary personal project is an AI-powered SIEM — a Splunk-style engine with core log ingestion, search and alerting rebuilt from first principles, topped with an AI layer for automated alert analysis and triage. The work spans two disciplines: reverse engineering and AI automation.
Nyzhnia's background combines hands-on offensive security with cloud and software engineering. She is proficient in Unix systems and programs in JavaScript, Python (including Flask), Bash, PowerShell, C# and T-SQL, alongside HCL (Terraform) and YAML for infrastructure and pipeline work.
Her experience covers the major public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure and GCP), containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Istio), infrastructure as code (Terraform), observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager) and CI/CD systems (Jenkins and GitHub Actions). On the security side she works regularly with Burp Suite, Metasploit, Nmap, Wireshark and Splunk.
Skills and expertise
Nyzhnia's skill set spans traditional network and application security, cloud security, DevSecOps, and an emerging practice of AI-assisted security operations.
Network & security
- Firewalls, IDS/IPS and VPNs
- Penetration testing
- Vulnerability assessment
- SSL/TLS and SSH
- mTLS and zero-trust networking (service mesh)
- OWASP Top 10 and OSINT
Cloud security
- AWS, Azure and GCP hardening
- SIEM and threat hunting
- Cloud posture and guardrails
- Identity — IAM, RBAC and workload identity
AI / ML security
A growing part of Nyzhnia's practice applies large language models and AI agents to security operations, always with an eye on the risks such systems introduce.
- LLM-assisted threat hunting and triage
- Prompt engineering (zero/few-shot, chain-of-thought)
- Local LLM inference (Ollama) for air-gapped analysis
- AI agents for SOC workflows (CrewAI)
- MLOps supply-chain and adversarial-ML awareness
DevSecOps & cloud-native
- Docker with image scanning (Trivy / Grype)
- Kubernetes security — NetworkPolicies, Pod Security Admission, RBAC
- Istio service mesh and Gateway API hardening
- Terraform with IaC scanning (Checkov, tfsec)
- GitOps delivery (ArgoCD) and policy as code (Kyverno)
- CI/CD security on Jenkins, GitLab CI and GitHub Actions (SAST / DAST / SCA — Semgrep, OWASP ZAP)
- Keyless CI/CD auth (AWS OIDC) and External Secrets Operator
- Secrets management (Vault, cloud KMS)
Observability
- Splunk
- Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager for security telemetry
- Node Exporter and log pipelines
- Anomaly detection and AIOps for incident response
Programming
- JavaScript, Python (incl. Flask)
- Bash, PowerShell
- C#, T-SQL
- HCL, YAML
Compliance
- PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR
- ISO 27001/27002, NIST
- CIS Benchmarks
Projects
A selection of Nyzhnia's personal and learning projects:
- AI-Powered SIEM — Splunk-style clone with an AI triage layer (in development)
- Project-Ramus — DevSecOps on AWS EKS (Terraform, ArgoCD GitOps, Trivy/tfsec, Kyverno)
- Web Pentest Lab
- AI Threat Hunting Tool
- Hacking Cheat Sheet
- OSINT database
- Digital Forensics Tool
- Vulnerability Scanner
- Referral app — two-tier CI/CD lab
- IaC misconfiguration scanner
- Kubernetes service-mesh hardening lab
Certifications
- ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)
- Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate
- CompTIA Network+
- CompTIA A+
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
- Google IT Support Professional Certificate
Open-source contributions
Nyzhnia has made open-source contributions to projects including Meta's open-source repositories and Anna's Archive.
Personal life
Away from security, Nyzhnia is a photographer and builds small tools for her hobbies. Her passion projects include a photography portfolio, a hyperfocal distance calculator for photographers, and a design practice tool. She also writes on a personal blog.