About Me

Carter Pfaff

Aerospace Engineering @ .

Reach me at carterpfaff@gmail.com, LinkedIn.

Carter Pfaff
Talks

Autonomous Exploitation at Scale

With the advent of powerful, open-source, and lightweight large language models, the cost barriers that typically prevent targeted attacks – with people manually scanning, infecting, and exploiting – are vastly reduced. This talk presents a self-propagating worm which autonomously detects devices, enumerates their vulnerabilities and services, checks for exploits which could work on them, and exploits them and spreads to them, forming a distributed network. It discusses the limitations, design decisions, and tradeoffs made in the development.

Presented at: HOPE 26

Download the presentation slides
Publications

LLMs are more than just fancy autocomplete

An article discussing mechanistic interpretability, it's implications for cybersecurity, and an analysis of different techniques.

Appeared in: 2600 Spring 2026

Work

DeepAI, Inc

Software Engineering Contractor · Early Fall 2024 - Late Spring 2025

  • Full stack development on a high-traffic consumer website (26th most popular consumer AI company, millions of users).
  • Built AI powered radio, music gallery, image editing, remixing, and more tools. Built math mode interfacing with Wolfram Alpha for Chat.
  • Redesigned homepage for improved UI/UX and to increase time spent on site while decreasing server costs.
  • Rebuilt Characters product, vastly increasing the amount of users and their usage.
  • Numerous, numerous bug fixes/minor updates

Long Island University

Research Intern · Spring 2026 - Summer 2026

  • Led research team of 6 interns.
  • Created weekly progress reports and presentations.
  • Developed models to study the cardiotoxicity of the drug amiodurone.
Experiences

LaGuardia Airport

Job Shadowing · School Year 2025 - 2026

  • Monthly trips organized by the Port Authority of NY & NJ
  • Learned about: Airport Wildlife Management, Air Traffic Control, Airport Firefighting, Snow Removal, and what goes into running one of the busiest airports in the US!

StructureTone & Gensler

Job Shadowing · Winter 2025 - Spring 2026

  • Job shadowing program with StructureTone (leading Construction Management firm) and Gensler (leading Architecture firm).
  • Led team of 6 Explorers in designing presentation, completing charettes, and doing takeoffs.
  • Successfully led team to create the most accurate takeoff.
  • Went on site visits, learned about BIM, Digital Twins, Photogrammetry, and robotics in construction.

New York Philosophical Society

Inaugural Academy Fellow

  • Met 3 times a week + went to weekly New York Philosophy Club meetings (open to the public).
  • Read 1-2 ancient wisdom literature books per week, and met to discuss them and get lectured in small groups.
  • Wrote two essays on certain lines following a triptych structure.