To the Admissions Committee: I taught the applicant Network Security and supervised their project. I recommend them for your MS in Cybersecurity.
For a class assignment to secure a web app, most students ran a scanner and patched what it flagged. The applicant threat-modeled the application first, found a business-logic flaw no scanner would catch — a privilege-escalation path through a legitimate feature — and wrote it up with a responsible-disclosure mindset. Thinking like an attacker while behaving like a professional is exactly the temperament this field needs.
I recommend them strongly.
To the Admissions Committee: I lead a security team and supervised the applicant, a security analyst, for three years. I support their MS in Cybersecurity application.
During an incident where alerts pointed everyone at a compromised server, the applicant distrusted the obvious and traced the real entry point to a misconfigured CI token — the actual root cause, hours before the team would have found it. They understand that in security the loudest signal is often not the source, and they have the patience to find what is.
They tuned our detection rules to cut alert fatigue meaningfully. I recommend them with conviction.
To the Admissions Committee: I supervised the applicant's research on malware detection. I recommend them for your MS in Cybersecurity.
The applicant built a classifier for malicious binaries and, when it hit high accuracy, tested it against adversarially modified samples rather than trusting the benchmark — where it degraded sharply, exactly as they suspected. Studying how your own defense fails under adversarial pressure is the discipline security research requires.
They document carefully and think adversarially by instinct. I endorse them highly.
To the Admissions Committee: I ran a product team the applicant secured, and recommend them for your MS in Cybersecurity.
The applicant explained our vulnerabilities in terms of business risk rather than CVE numbers — telling me which flaw could actually cost us customers versus which was theoretical — so I could prioritize sanely. A security professional who translates threat into business consequence is far more useful than one who just hands you a scan.
I recommend them enthusiastically.