Nick Aleks
Head Of Security Operations
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarNick Aleks is a cybersecurity engineer, author, and operator with a decade of hands-on experience blending offensive security, engineering, and leadership across fintech and enterprise environments. He founded Aleks Security and co-created DEFCON Toronto, authored Black Hat GraphQL and Black Hat Bash, and has contributed to the Damn-Vulnerable-GraphQL project to teach practical GraphQL exploitation and defenses. Nick has led security programs at Wealthsimple, TD, and now Robinhood, building R&D teams and integrating platforms like SOAR, BAS, and EDR to harden cloud and DevOps environments. Known for unconventional red-team skills—he’s tested everything from web APIs to locks, cars, drones, and smart buildings—he pairs practical hacking craft with board-level advisory roles for academic cybersecurity programs. Based in Austin, he brings a rare mix of published research, open-source education, and product-minded security leadership.
10 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
French
Stackoverflow
31reputation
2kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (16)
graphql10
authentication10
user-authentication10
python10
wordpress-graphql10
wpgraphql10
graphene10
flask10
flask-ask10
security10
sqlalchemy9
penetration-testing8
vulnerability8
safari6
ios6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
dolevf/Damn-Vulnerable-GraphQL-Application
Jan 2022 - Aug 2022
Damn Vulnerable GraphQL Application is an intentionally vulnerable GraphQL service implementation designed for learning about and practising GraphQL Security.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:13 reviews, 55 commits, 19 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the GraphQL application, including adding new mutations, such as `editPaste` and `createUser`. They made changes to the core views and models, demonstrating knowledge of the application's GraphQL schema and data structure. The user also worked on security aspects, such as access control and audit logging for search queries and subscriptions, as well as fixing a security issue with the authentication tokens. Furthermore, the user is responsible for the version bump.
damn-vulnerable-web-applicationvulnerablesecuritypenetration-testingfacebook
nicholasaleks/graphql-threat-matrix
Apr 2022 - Jul 2022
GraphQL threat framework used by security professionals to research security gaps in GraphQL implementations
Contributions:5 reviews, 90 commits, 7 PRs in 2 months
implementationsgapssecurity-professionalssecurity-researchsecurity
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