Brian Gaines

Started in academic rhetoric — PhD work on surveillance theory at Virginia Tech. When the higher education market collapsed, I took the theoretical toolkit somewhere it could do real work.

Now building security infrastructure in a homelab I call The Sprawl. Studying for an AAS in Cybersecurity at Tri-County. Deploying the same critical frameworks I used to write about.

Current focus: SOC operations, SIEM architecture, threat detection, and the intersection of AI tooling with defensive security.