My Work

portscout

Lightweight port scanner with service fingerprinting and banner grabbing. Designed for internal network audits — faster than nmap for large /16 ranges with custom rate limiting.

  • Go
  • Networking
  • CLI
portscout

tls-inspect

TLS handshake analyzer that extracts cipher suites, certificate chains, and HSTS headers. Useful for auditing web services before pen-test engagements. Outputs clean JSON or human-readable reports.

  • Python
  • TLS/SSL
  • Security Audit
tls-inspect

hardened-baseline

Opinionated hardening scripts for Debian/Ubuntu servers. Implements CIS benchmark level 2 with sane defaults for cloud VMs. Used internally before open-sourcing.

  • Bash
  • Python
  • Linux
  • CIS Benchmark
hardened-baseline

Previously worked with

About Me

I'm a security engineer with 8+ years of experience in network infrastructure, penetration testing, and building internal tooling for security teams. My day-to-day involves threat modeling, red-team exercises, and reviewing systems before they become incidents. Previously at Cloudflare and Wargaming, and a couple of startups that no longer exist.

Outside of work I contribute to open-source security tooling, write occasional posts about things I find interesting, and spend too much time tuning Linux systems.

My Resume
Alex Mercer