About me

Who am I? My name is Max ‘Libra’ Kersten. Nearly everything in that involves security has my interest, whereas malware has always had my interest. My nickname is a reference to my Zodiac sign. I graduated cum laude from the IT & Cyber Security bachelor of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in 2019. Currently, I work as a malware analyst in Trellix‘ Advanced Threat Research team.

As this is a personal website, all opinions and views on here are mine and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Besides doing research, I like to write papers to inform others about the best practices and newest trends in the security world. On this website, I’ll be posting security whitepapers, proof of concepts of vulnerabilities and other projects.

The biggest project I am currently working on, is the Binary Analysis Course, in which the methods to analyse multiple types of binaries are explained with the use of free and open-source software, together with step-by-step explanations of both the technical side and the thought process of the analyst.

My own projects follow my interests, resulting in multiple side projects. I have made an anti-ransomware tool named Capricorn and an anti-virus evasive shellcode packing tool named Gemini. Another tool I’ve made combines the strengths of multiple open-source tools to convert an APK into an Android Studio project. This allows the IDE to be used for reverse engineering. The project can be found here.

Other projects that I will post from time to time are analyses of Android malware, proof of concepts and workshops/lectures. Security awareness is important, since the weakest link is, more often than not, a human being. If you want to talk about awareness or want me to give a workshop/lecture, feel free to e-mail me at any given time.
Besides the aforementioned things, I am also an avid Reddit user on numerous subreddits. My nickname is ThisIsLibra. One can also find me on Twitter where I post the updates to my projects.

My proof-of-concepts can be found, together with my other projects, on my GitHub account under the name of ThisIsLibra.

To contact me, you can e-mail me at [info][at][maxkersten][dot][nl], send me a PM on Reddit or message me on Twitter @Libranalysis.