Mitch Hines is a cyber security founder and practitioner with 11 years of experience leading red team operations and assessments across industry and government. As Founder of Cyndicate Labs and a CREST Lead Assessor, he blends hands-on offensive engineering with rigorous assessment and accreditation practices, currently also serving as an assessor for the UK Cyber Security Council. His background includes senior red team leadership at Deloitte and CCL Solutions, and technical CHECK team leadership roles earlier in his career. Mitch contributes practical tooling to the security community—his dnsteal project demonstrates deep protocol-level engineering for covert data exfiltration while showing a clear focus on secure, hardened implementations. He combines entrepreneurial drive with operational discipline, making him adept at translating complex attack techniques into actionable, auditable improvements for clients.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BSc) Computer Science at University of Birmingham
DNS Exfiltration tool for stealthily sending files over DNS requests.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Contributions:25 commits, 3 PRs, 24 pushes in 6 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Mitch primarily focused on developing a DNS exfiltration tool. Their work includes implementing core DNS query and response logic using Python, adding support for GZIP and base64 encoding to handle larger data transfers, and improving the overall stability of the code. They also made efforts to prevent potential security vulnerabilities, such as blocking the use of ".." and "/" characters in filenames, indicating a focus on security hardening.
Contributions:10 commits, 12 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 2 months
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