About Nicholas James Vidal

15 years leading cyber defense strategy, incident response, and secure infrastructure design

My Story

With over 15 years of experience in cybersecurity, I've dedicated my career to protecting organizations from evolving cyber threats through strategic defense planning, incident response, and secure infrastructure design.

Currently serving as a Senior Cybersecurity Director in the United States Air Force, I lead division-wide cyber defense initiatives, manage critical incident responses, and ensure compliance with NIST and AFI standards across multi-million-dollar network infrastructures.

My expertise spans Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR), malware analysis, cloud security architecture, and AI-augmented security automation. I'm passionate about leveraging cutting-edge technology to stay ahead of adversaries and build resilient defense systems.

Beyond traditional cybersecurity, I'm actively developing AI-powered tools including RAG agents, N8N automation workflows, and MCP servers to enhance operational efficiency and threat detection capabilities.

Certifications

  • ▸CompTIA Security+
  • ▸CISSP (Expected 3/2026)
  • ▸A+

Technical Expertise

Advanced capabilities across security operations, cloud architecture, and AI-powered automation

Digital Forensics & Incident Response

  • ▸Volatility Framework
  • ▸FTK / EnCase
  • ▸Log Analysis
  • ▸Malware Triage & Reverse Engineering
  • ▸Network Forensics (Wireshark, Zeek)
  • ▸Memory Forensics

Cloud & Infrastructure Security

  • ▸AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, GuardDuty)
  • ▸Azure (Active Directory, Sentinel)
  • ▸GCP (Compute, IAM, Security Command Center)
  • ▸Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)
  • ▸Container Security (Docker, Kubernetes)

Security Operations & Tools

  • ▸SIEM (Splunk, Wazuh, ELK)
  • ▸EDR/XDR Solutions
  • ▸IDS/IPS (Snort, Suricata)
  • ▸Vulnerability Management (Nessus, Qualys)
  • ▸Penetration Testing (Metasploit, Burp Suite)

AI & Automation

  • ▸RAG Agents
  • ▸N8N Automation
  • ▸MCP Servers
  • ▸Python Scripting
  • ▸PowerShell
  • ▸Bash/Shell Scripting

Programming & Development

  • ▸Python (Security Automation)
  • ▸JavaScript / TypeScript
  • ▸Next.js / React
  • ▸SQL / NoSQL Databases
  • ▸API Development

Technical Skills

  • ▸Network Architecture & Design
  • ▸Active Directory Administration
  • ▸Virtualization (Proxmox, VMware, Hyper-V)
  • ▸N8N Workflows
  • ▸CI/CD Pipelines