Flynn Townsend

Portfolio · Sydney, Australia

Flynn
Townsend

Cyber security graduate who builds and ships real tools.

Degree
B. Cybersecurity, UTS
WAM
76.57 · Distinction
Clearance
Australian citizen · clearance eligible
Available
Now

About

Bachelor of Cybersecurity graduate from UTS Sydney, finished in 2026 with a Distinction average. I work front of house at a five-star hotel and build the software my workplace actually runs on. Outside the degree I put a lot of my own time into AI, working out where the current models genuinely help, where they do not, and how to build with them rather than around them. Approval gained to shadow the hotel's Conference & Events team beginning August, which will provide experience I will leverage in my future career prospects. Aiming at graduate cyber security and sales engineering roles in Sydney.

Selected work

03 projects

In service

Not a mock-up. The tracker the bar actually runs on.

Mise en place before doors, a two-tap sale flow built for speed in the dark, and an end-of-day close that reconciles card totals against the EFTPOS settlement and prints a MICROS-ready report.

Dispense open on the service screen at a banquet bar, EFTPOS terminal alongside
The terminal as it sits on the bar. iPad on a stand, EFTPOS beside it, function room behind.
Dispense service screen: beverages grouped by category on the left, current sale and card charge on the right
Service screen, mid-set. Beverages on the left, current sale and card charge on the right.
Service Ledger panel open on the iPad during a function, EFTPOS terminal alongside
Ledger open mid-function, next to the EFTPOS terminal it has to reconcile against.
Service Ledger listing each sale with its items, time, card type and amount
Every sale numbered, timestamped and tagged by card type. Voided sales stay in the audit trail but leave every total.
In-app operating guide walking a new user through the mise, service and close stages
The Guide: in-app reference so any staff member can run the terminal cold.
End of Day screen showing takings, transaction count and payments broken down by card type
Close: takings and payments by card type, reconciled against the EFTPOS settlement before the report goes out.

Personal project

APEX. Four pillars, one record.

A private tracker for training, recovery, supplements and lab results. Doses and sessions go in; the app models how much of each supplement or prescribed medication is still active from its published half-life, projects that a week forward, and plots it against body and lab trends. The interesting problem is the pharmacokinetics: every entry decays on its own exponential curve, absorption and elimination run at different rates, and overlapping doses have to sum correctly across weeks. Local-first by design: reminders are scheduled on the device, cloud sync is optional, and the whole record exports as JSON the user actually owns.

APEX Today screen: doses due, modelled active levels, recovery metrics and weight
Today: what is due, modelled active levels, and recovery, weight and training against goal at a glance.
APEX Trends screen plotting modelled levels for three compounds over a month with a now, peak and half-life table
Trends: levels, body and labs on one timeline. Stated plainly as modelled mg-equivalents, not a blood test.
APEX workout logger showing exercises, sets, weight and reps with a session volume total
Train: sets, weight and reps per exercise, with session volume totalled as you log.
APEX library screen listing supplements and prescription GLP-1 medications, each with its route and half-life
Stack: the library the model runs on, each entry carrying the published half-life its decay curve is built from.

The degree

UTS · 2023–2026

Weighted average

76.57

Distinction average across the full course.

Highest mark

88 HD

41182 System Security. The most core security subject in the degree.

High distinctions

04

Two in core security subjects, one in communication and one in professional practice. The combination the work actually calls for.

Studied abroad

13 days

Tropical Data Science School, Penang. Credited into the degree.

Filter

Security core

41182 System Security Hardening, endpoint and perimeter security, attack surfaces. HD 88
41181 Information Security & Management Governance, risk and policy. The language a customer's security leadership speaks. HD 86
42035 Cloud Security AWS (EC2, IAM), ACSC cloud guidance, ISO/IEC 27017 and shared responsibility. D 82
43010 Cyber Threat Intel & Incident Response APT38 IR plan on the ACSC template, NIST and SANS lifecycles, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. D 81
41092 Network Fundamentals TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VPNs and firewalls, hands-on in Wireshark and Packet Tracer. D 81
41900 Cryptography Analysed an SSH man-in-the-middle attack; cracked WEP and WPA2 in a lab against WPA3. Autumn 2025
42037 IoT Security IoT threat modelling that fed directly into the capstone detection pipeline. Autumn 2025 D
42036 Cybersecurity for Mobile Platforms Platform security models, mobile threat surface and app hardening. Spring 2025
65325 Digital Forensics & Digital Trace Two subjects, ending in a court-style expert report on EnCase E01 images with Autopsy, FTK Imager and Eric Zimmerman tools. 2024 · 2026

Analytics & machine learning

41180 Data Analytics in Cybersecurity Spam and intrusion classifiers in scikit-learn, TensorFlow and PyTorch, tested against adversarial ML evasion. D 78
Capstone Cybersecurity Capstone Studio Isolation Forest on IoT-23, served from a Flask API on a Raspberry Pi 4B, live predictions into Elastic and Kibana. Spring 2025 D
31250 Introduction to Data Analytics A 35,000-record loan-default pipeline: engineered temporal features, a deliberate missing-data strategy, a held-out 15,000-prediction submission. Autumn 2026 D
49084 Tropical Data Science School Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. Credited back as a Special Assignment in Engineering or IT Skills. Jan 2025 HD · ungraded

Professional & foundations

31265 Communication for IT Professionals An HD in communication inside a technical degree, then exercised on a forensics report for a non-technical audience. HD 86
31272 Project Management & the Professional Scope, stakeholders, risk and delivery. The vocabulary of consulting and pre-sales. D 77
95005 Transdisciplinary Practice Worked within a group of 5 people to create a briefing document and formal speech delivered to an industry partner, Microsoft. Autumn 2026
43030 Professional Practice in Computing Ethics, professional conduct and the practical shape of working in the industry. 2026 HD
Yr 1–2 Foundations Programming, Web Systems, Database Fundamentals, Business Requirements Modelling and Information Systems. The reason I could build and ship Dispense and Function. 2023 · 2024

Full coursework breakdown, in long form

Academic work

What the subjects produced

ML IoT Anomaly Detection Pipeline

Capstone. Isolation Forest trained on the IoT-23 dataset, served via a Flask API on a Raspberry Pi 4B, live predictions feeding an Elastic and Kibana dashboard for real-time triage.

Python · Machine learning · Elastic · Kibana · Flask

View repo

Windows Digital Forensic Investigation

Full examination of EnCase E01 disk images: hash-verified integrity, artefact recovery and correlation with Autopsy, FTK Imager and Eric Zimmerman tools, counter-forensics identified (JPEG/ZIP polyglot, AES archives). Delivered as a court-style expert report.

Digital forensics · Autopsy · FTK Imager · Windows artefacts

APT38 Incident Response Plan

Incident response plan for a simulated APT38 intrusion against a financial institution, mapped to the cyber kill chain and MITRE ATT&CK, structured on the ACSC template with NIST and SANS lifecycle stages.

Incident response · Threat intel · MITRE ATT&CK · NIST

ML Security Classifiers

Spam, network intrusion and DDoS detection classifiers in Python (scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch), evaluated on accuracy, precision and recall, and tested against adversarial ML evasion.

Python · scikit-learn · TensorFlow · Adversarial ML

Loan Default Prediction Pipeline

Supervised classification on a 35,000-record lending dataset: EDA, engineered temporal features, a deliberate missing-data strategy and a held-out 15,000-prediction submission, including a date-format bug caught before it silently corrupted half the test set.

pandas · scikit-learn · Feature engineering · Data quality

Consumer Behaviour Analysis · Penang

Team project at Universiti Sains Malaysia: survey data cleaned and modelled in JMP and R, then built into a Tableau dashboard and presented to the cohort at the close of the school.

JMP · R · Tableau · Power BI · Mixed international team

Exchange · 5.4162° N, 100.3327° E

Tropical Data Science School, Penang

In January 2025 I flew to Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang for the Tropical Data Science School, a UTS faculty-led Global Short Program. Thirteen days of data science taught intensively at a partner university, in mixed international teams, in a country I had never been to.

Mornings were statistics and modelling in JMP, R and TensorFlow; afternoons were the group project, building a consumer behaviour analysis into a Tableau dashboard and presenting it to the cohort. The cohort also visited Intel's Penang site. The rest of it was Penang Hill, a Holi celebration on campus, sunset on the causeway, and learning to work with people whose reference points were nothing like mine. It came back as ungraded towards the degree, but the part worth hiring is the part that does not appear on a transcript.

Institution
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Location
Penang, Malaysia
Dates
5 – 17 January 2025
Programme
FEIT faculty-led Global Short Program
Credit
49084 Special Assignment
Site visit
Intel, Penang
Stack
JMP · R · Tableau · Power BI · TensorFlow
The international cohort gathered around a workstation while a host walks them through a demonstration
Walked through a demonstration on site in Penang.
On campus with a fellow attendee wearing the USM and UTS Tropical Data Science School lanyard
USM student buddies ran the cohort for the fortnight.
Holi colour celebration on the USM campus
Part of the cohort with their USM student buddies at the Penang Hill skywalk
Sunset over the water from a causeway outside Penang
Part of the cohort at the water's edge at sunset

Skills

The short version

Security operations

SIEM (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic & Kibana) · log analysis · incident response · digital forensics · MITRE ATT&CK · AWS cloud security · Wireshark

Building software

Python (scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch) · JavaScript & TypeScript · Next.js · Supabase (Postgres, RLS) · offline-first PWAs · Git & CI

Analytics

pandas · feature engineering · JMP · R & RStudio · Tableau · Power BI · model evaluation and adversarial testing

AI tooling

Anthropic Claude and Claude Code · agent skills and MCP connectors · prompt and context design · AI-assisted development, review and documentation

Privacy & decentralisation

Tor · PGP and GnuPG key management in Kleopatra · VPNs · explored cryptocurrency and blockchain, including running nodes locally

Certifications

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, in progress · Diploma of Information Technology, Deakin College (2023)

Hiring in Sydney?

Graduate cyber security or sales engineering.

Australian citizen, eligible for a security clearance, available now.
Get in touch