My capstone team stood up a full enterprise network for a fictional dog-rental company: web, database, Active Directory, DNS, firewall, the works. Then we hardened it and defended it live while other teams attacked for a week.

I led the web and AI infrastructure and served as security lead, wiring an incident-response loop that pairs an intrusion detection system with an auto-blocking layer and an AI agent for triage.

Twenty-one vulnerability findings documented from pentest week, and a 480-line writeup covering the architecture, the hardening, and what got through anyway.

The interesting part was watching the AI-assisted response cut the time between an alert and a decision, and learning where a human still has to be in the loop.