John Hammond
Senior Principal Security Researcher at Just Hacking Training
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Hammond is a Senior Principal Security Researcher and educator with a decade of hands-on experience breaking, teaching, and explaining adversary techniques from the San Francisco Bay Area. At Huntress he leads threat operations and research while also co-founding Just Hacking Training and producing widely viewed CTF walkthroughs and tooling—most notably contributing core decoding, recursion, and steghide/web units to the Katana automatic CTF solver. A former DoD instructor and red team operator, he blends classroom pedagogy with realistic emulation, having developed training for PicoCTF, DEF CON competitions, and military cyber curricula. John’s technical depth spans offensive Python/PowerShell, PTY and privilege escalation work in projects like pwncat, and a long list of advanced certifications, reflecting both practical exploitation skills and commitment to community education.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Server Hardening & Windows Defense Securing Windows and PowerShell Automation, Server Hardening & Windows Defense Securing Windows and PowerShell Automation at SANS Technology InstituteElectrical Engineering, Electrical Engineering at US Coast Guard Academy
Github Skills (18)
strings10
penetration-testing10
python10
privilege-escalation10
text-manipulation10
it-security10
linux10
security10
regular-expression10
command-line-interface9
fileio9
file-access9
file-handling9
file-processing9
colorama8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
JohnHammond/katana
Mar 2019 - Feb 2022
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:438 commits, 11 PRs, 42 pushes in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:John contributed to the development of the Katana challenge solver, adding several new features and expanding its capabilities. They implemented units for base64, hex, and URL decoding, enhanced the existing unit structure to perform recursion, and addressed several bugs that arose in the tool. The user's efforts also involved integrating new steghide, and web-related units, improving the robustness and coverage of the challenge solver.
pythonctfkatanasolverctf-challenge
calebstewart/pwncat
May 2020 - Jun 2021
Fancy reverse and bind shell handler
Role in this project:Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:1 review, 114 commits, 1 PR in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:John appears to be focused on implementing and improving security aspects within the "pwncat" project. They have modified and enhanced the pseudoterminal (PTY) handling, adding features like raw mode, disabling echo, and setting up custom prompts. The user has made significant changes to the `pty.py` and `util.py` files, which include functionality related to colors, output formatting, and more. Further, the user has also developed methods for privilege escalation, including "setuid" and "sudo" approaches and integrated new GTFOBins exploits.
bind-shellshellenumerationhandlerprivilege-escalation
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