About Me

Carter Pfaff

Aerospace Engineering @ Brooklyn Technical.

  • Based in NYC
  • Engineering Mech, Aero, and CS
  • Academy Fellow @ NY Philosophical Society
  • 50 repos and counting: github.com/melonmars

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


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