The experience behind the practice
Sheeraz Ali leads cybersecurity at Utilities Studio. This profile brings together the professional experience published on his personal website. His background includes penetration testing at Cobalt, security engineering at SolarWinds, content engineering at Hack The Box and platform leadership at PwnedLabs. The work covers assessments as well as building systems and teaching attack techniques.
Assessment across connected systems
At Cobalt, Sheeraz reports 245 engagements across AI and LLM systems, web applications, mobile, APIs, cloud environments, networks and desktop clients. His stated AI testing areas include prompt injection, jailbreaks, attacks against retrieval systems and misuse of agent tools. Cloud assessment experience includes AWS, Azure and GCP, with identity and access configuration among the areas examined.
Experience on the engineering side
His SolarWinds role included building a penetration testing program, leading a security team and conducting threat modeling and architecture reviews. He reports that mean vulnerability resolution time fell from about three months to 40 days during that work. His listed qualifications include OSCP, CRTP and CREST Registered Penetration Tester certifications.
Research and reported career results
Sheeraz reports 1,592 vulnerabilities identified across his Cobalt engagements, 28+ CVEs discovered and 300+ Hack The Box machines and labs authored. These figures describe different parts of his professional record and are kept separate. They give context for the practice he leads, with each claim linked back to his published profile.
