Building toward Infrastructure Security Engineering.
I am Ilham Zaman, a second-year Cybersecurity Analytics and Operations student at Penn State and an Aspiring Platform Security & Infrastructure Security Engineer.
About Me
I use my home lab to turn classroom concepts into practical systems experience. Instead of only reading about virtualization, Linux administration, networking, storage, monitoring, and automation, I operate services and learn what happens when real systems need to be maintained, secured, documented, and recovered.
I also operate Hermes Agent on a dedicated Ubuntu Server VM as a self-hosted AI assistant for infrastructure investigation, documentation, and controlled home-lab operations. It uses a cloud-hosted language model, a private Discord interface, and a self-hosted Honcho memory stack.
My current direction sits at the intersection of Infrastructure Security Engineering, Platform Security Engineering, and secure systems operations. I am especially interested in making infrastructure repeatable, observable, and easier to recover.
Education
Information Sciences and Technology
Security and Risk Analysis
What I am focused on
Linux & networking
Strengthening systems administration, routing, DNS, packet analysis, segmentation, and defensive security fundamentals.
Infrastructure as code
Using Terraform and Ansible to reduce repetitive setup, configuration drift, and undocumented changes.
Monitoring & reliability
Improving health visibility, alerting, backup planning, recovery procedures, and service documentation.
Professional development
Translating hands-on home-lab work into the judgment and communication expected in infrastructure and security roles.



