Welcome to DataSec Chronicles!
By day, I query data. By night, I hunt threats in it.
I've spent 10+ years asking questions of data — how many, how often, what pattern. I live in SQL, Python, and dashboards, across healthcare claims, government procurement, and fraud detection. Spotting the one outlier in a million rows is the job I already know how to do.
Then I started asking a harder question: what if someone is trying to take this data — or hide inside it?
That question pulled me into cybersecurity, and it turned out I wasn't starting over. Threat hunting is querying with higher stakes. Log analysis is messy data you have to clean first. The instinct to find patterns and anomalies is the same one I first learned reading weather models — it just points at a different kind of storm now.
So I started doing the work in public, and documenting it here.
A few things I've built along the way:
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The Mirai Botnet Investigation — My flagship three-part investigation into the Mirai Botnet: dissecting 1.32 million Zeek connection records in SQLite. The data reveals a C2 beacon pulsing at a precise ~755-second cadence, captures a self-propagating scanner mid-spread, and traces a complete SSH intrusion from initial probe to full compromise.
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A network anomaly-detection pipeline — 2.8M+ traffic flows through an Isolation Forest model, with a counterintuitive finding I didn't expect: the most anomalous flows were mostly benign oddballs, while the real attacks hid in the moderate zone.
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DataSec Labs — interactive tools I build to make security concepts clickable, not just readable, at labs.datasecchronicles.com.
I'm still climbing — certifications in progress, new investigations queued, plenty left to learn. That's the point of doing it out loud. DataSec Chronicles is the honest record of an analyst becoming a defender: every query, every dead end, every finding that surprised me.
If you're coming from data, evaluating what I can do, or just curious how an analyst thinks about defense — you're in the right place.
Start with the investigation that best shows how I work → The Mirai Botnet Investigation
Glad you're here.
— Tasha 💜