James Mclean - Penetration Tester

James Mclean

Penetration Tester

Greater Adelaide Area Australia

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Summary

👤

Senior

🎓

Top School

James Mclean is a seasoned penetration tester with 13 years of experience blending offensive security, application testing, and systems administration across enterprise and government environments. He has led and scaled security operations and triage teams at Bugcrowd, managed complex customer-facing pentests across web, cloud, mobile and IoT, and now continues hands-on red-team work at ctrl:cyber. A former developer turned offensive specialist, he contributes tooling and integrations to open-source projects—improving host discovery, DNS validation and Censys integration—which reflects his strong backend and API skills. He’s comfortable translating technical findings to stakeholders, delivering exploit development and source-code review, and teaching others (guest lecturing in a Masters program). Outside work he’s an OSCP/OSWP-certified pentester and a homebrewer, a detail that hints at both methodical precision and creative tinkering.

13 years of coding experience

13 years of employment as a software developer

ZCE, PHP5, ZCE, PHP5 at Zend Certified Engineer

Year 12, High School, Year 12, High School at Urrbrae Agricultural High School

Sun Certified Solaris Associate, Sun Certified Solaris Associate at Sun Certified Solaris Associate

Computing and Information Science, Computing and Information Science at University of South Australia

Stackoverflow

Stats

51reputation

9kreached

0answers

1question

Github Skills (19)

scanner10

penetration-testing10

python10

apidoc10

testing10

security10

go10

api10

dns10

golang10

network-security10

bug-tracker9

bug-reporting9

bugtracking9

Programming languages (11)

TypeScriptShellMakefileJavaScriptGoPHPHTMLPerl

Github contributions (5)

vortexau/dnsvalidator

Jul 2019 - Mar 2020

Maintains a list of IPv4 DNS servers by verifying them against baseline servers, and ensuring accurate responses.

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:23 commits, 1 PR, 9 pushes in 8 months

Contributions summary:James contributed to the core logic of the DNS validator. They implemented features to detect DNS poisoning, including checking NXDOMAIN responses for random subdomains. They modified the code to include checking multiple popular domains. The user also added timeout checks for baseline servers and removed debugging code.

dnsipv4resolverdns-serversdyndns

michenriksen/aquatone

Jun 2017 - Jun 2017

A Tool for Domain Flyovers

Role in this project:

Backend Developer

Contributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 3 days

Contributions summary:James primarily focused on integrating the Censys API into the Aquatone tool. They started by adding the initial Censys API collector, then implemented the logic to correctly communicate with the API and parse the results. The integration involved handling authentication and constructing API requests to retrieve data, specifically TLS certificate information, and incorporating the results into Aquatone's host discovery capabilities. The user subsequently updated the key names used for authentication and rolled back the versioning information.

golangsecurity-toolsreconnaissancesecuritybugbounty

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