About

Hi! I'm Alikhan Uzakov. I’m a Senior Security Engineer at FINRA, where I help design, build and secure the stability of financial markets. Previously I worked at Clearswift, PwC, Zoopla, and Marks and Spencer.

I am a strong believer of “human” AppSec, where helping and influencing developers’ mindset by providing resources, guidance, interesting and hands-on training goes a long way. Great products are built through cooperation, openness and bringing modern practises to the table. Too often security people try to approach security only from the policy, bureaucratic side or even force it, without understanding the underlying reasons why things were done a particular way. AppSec should not be the roadblocker but rather your teammate, or an internal consultant.

If you’d like to get in touch, I’m alikhan at this domain.

You can find an RSS feed of recent posts here.

Things about me

I have a background in Computer Science and Mathematics and especially enjoy projects that use graph theory. My favourite TV show is Scrubs. My favourite book is Hard to be a God by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky.

What do I read?

This is the list of some of the websites that I read on a regular basis. Not everything written on them I necessarily agree with, so don’t take this as an endorsement of these websites.

• https://www.damninteresting.com/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/
• http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
• https://hackerone.com/hacktivity
• https://habr.com/ru/