One person.
Real work.
HTP Security is run by Julian Hydell — that’s me. I do security work professionally, build custom hardware as both a hobby and a service, and teach free community classes about the scams targeting people’s families. This page is the long version of why.
Last year, scammers used my voice
to try to trick my grandmother.
They didn’t know me. They probably didn’t know her, specifically — they were running a script. They scraped a few seconds of audio of me speaking from somewhere online, ran it through a voice-cloning model, and called my grandmother’s phone with a familiar voice saying I was in trouble and needed money fast.
She’s sharp. She didn’t fall for it — but it was close. Close enough that it’s the reason this business exists in the form it does.
I’d been doing security work for a while before that — pen testing, RF research, network hardening, hardware tinkering. The technical side of the field. After that call, I realized that the thing I knew how to do well — explain how attacks actually work, in plain language, with live demos — was something almost nobody was offering to the people who needed it most. So I built a curriculum. Started teaching it free. And built HTP Security around the idea that the paid work and the free work belong under the same roof.
Most of my peers in security pick a side: corporate consulting, or community education, or independent research. I’m bad at picking. The technical work funds the workshops. The workshops keep me close to the people the technical work is supposed to protect. They reinforce each other in ways that are obvious once you see them and easy to miss until you do.
Hands on the hardware.
I came up through hardware, not pure software. Building things that actually do something — RF capture rigs, embedded sensors, network gear. The kind of work where you can’t bluff your way through, because if you got it wrong the device just sits there.
That foundation shapes how I do security work. I don’t do checklist audits. I don’t generate compliance reports for compliance’s sake. I look at what’s actually running, what an attacker would actually do, and what a small set of high-leverage changes would actually fix. The output is something a person can read and act on, not a 60-page PDF that nobody opens.
I publish a lot of my hobby work openly under the name HyTechProjects on GitHub. Some of it is professionally relevant; some of it is just me messing with things. Both are part of the same practice — staying current, staying curious, and not losing the thread of why this is interesting.
What I’ve been
building lately.
A non-exhaustive list. The published projects live on GitHub; client work doesn’t.
- 01
Wardrive Analysis Platform
Open-source tool for analyzing 802.11 captures with OUI vendor lookup, BLE/Zigbee support, and MAC randomization handling. Electron desktop + mobile PWA.
Look at it - 02
Custom multi-radio platforms
PCB-level designs combining WiFi, Bluetooth, sub-GHz RF, NFC, and GPS in a single carrier — built for security research and field work.
- 03
ESP32 sensing & RF tooling
Passive WiFi/BLE loggers, RF capture rigs, GPS-correlated wardriving hardware. Documented and published where possible.
- 04
UniFi network engineering
Hardened home and small-business deployments — VLAN segmentation, IoT isolation, AI-camera integration, monitoring.
What I work with.
Not a full list — just the things I reach for most often.
How I work,
in five lines.
- 01
If I can’t explain it to someone’s grandmother, I don’t understand it well enough yet.
- 02
Fixed-fee, scoped, in writing — before any work starts. No hourly meter.
- 03
If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you and recommend someone who can.
- 04
The workshops will always be free. That’s not a strategy.
- 05
Reports are written for the person who has to act on them — not the person paying the invoice.
Want to talk?
Email is best.
No form, no booking calendar, no qualifying questions. Just send me what’s going on and I’ll write back within a couple of days.