Meet Abraham
I’m Abraham Aranguren, founder and CEO of 7ASecurity. I came into security from a software development background, which still shapes how I work today: I care about finding real risk, but also about helping engineering teams fix problems in a practical way. I’ve spent 17 years in information security and 24 in IT overall. Since founding 7ASecurity in 2011, we’ve focused on high-quality penetration tests, code audits, and hands-on training across web, mobile, desktop, infrastructure, cloud, and AI-driven systems.
Today, 7ASecurity is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified, an OWASP Platinum Corporate Supporter, and our work has been trusted by organizations including the Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, the Tor Project, and The Guardian. I’ve also trained at events such as BlackHat USA, HITB, and OWASP Global AppSec, while 7ASecurity training has been delivered at conferences including DEF CON, LASCON, Nullcon, OWASP Global AppSec, and BruCON.
What inspired you to create 7ASecurity?
I created 7ASecurity because I saw a gap between what organizations needed and what much of the market was delivering. Too many security engagements felt like checkbox exercises: long reports, generic tool output, limited business context, and not much help after the PDF landed. I wanted to build the opposite of that: a consultancy that is threat-model-driven, manual, researcher-led, collaborative, and developer-friendly. That is why we scope work around what matters most to the client, share interim findings during the engagement, provide clear remediation guidance, verify fixes for free, and back our work with a quality guarantee. For me, good security work should reduce real risk, not just generate paperwork.
What makes your training different from traditional cybersecurity courses?
Our training is built the same way we approach audits: practical first. We call it “all action, no fluff.” Students do the work. They go through vulnerable apps, guided labs, step-by-step videos, and realistic exercises instead of spending most of their time watching slides. The material is designed to be useful regardless of skill level, and students get lifetime access plus future updates rather than a course that goes stale after a week. We also offer free workshops so people can experience the teaching style first, and our certifications are hands-on rather than multiple-choice.
How would you explain pentesting & code audits to someone new to cybersecurity?
A pentest is a controlled attack carried out by ethical hackers to find and safely exploit weaknesses before real attackers do. A code audit is the inside view: instead of only probing the application from the outside, you review the source code and design decisions to find subtle issues earlier and more efficiently. The best results usually come from combining both. A pentest shows how a problem can be abused in practice, while a code audit explains why it exists and how to fix it thoroughly.
What are the most common vulnerabilities you see today?
The highest-impact issues are still very familiar: broken access control, authorization mistakes, business logic flaws, insecure authentication flows, and classic injection or XSS-style problems. What has changed is the breadth of the attack surface. If you look at modern systems, you also have to think about privacy, cloud exposure, threat modeling, supply-chain risk, and now AI-specific risks such as prompt injection, data leakage, and excessive agency. So the fundamentals still matter enormously, but today’s defenders need to think across the whole system, not just one application layer.
How do you balance accessibility for newcomers with depth for experts?
We try to give newcomers a fast path to competence without boring experienced people. The key is structure: start with clear fundamentals and guided labs, then ramp into deeper scenarios, edge cases, and professional workflows. Because the material is hands-on and self-paced, beginners can revisit concepts as many times as they need, while advanced students can move faster and push harder. That same philosophy extends to certification as well: we prefer realistic, practical assessment over memorization.
What advice would you give someone starting a career in cybersecurity?
Build by doing. Set up labs. Read real public pentest reports. Learn enough development to understand how software actually breaks. Practice writing clearly, because finding a bug is only half the job; the other half is communicating impact and remediation in a way that other people can act on. And if you can, contribute to the community through research, writeups, or open source. Public work compounds over time. It builds skill, credibility, and judgment.
What role does AI play in both cyberattacks and defense?
AI is an amplifier on both sides. For attackers, it reduces the cost of reconnaissance, social engineering, and experimentation, while AI-native products introduce their own attack surface: prompt injection, jailbreaks, training data poisoning, task hijacking, and unsafe tool or agent behavior. For defenders, AI can absolutely help with triage, enrichment, and productivity. But I do not see it replacing human expertise. We learned this same lesson years ago with scanners: automation is useful, but the most dangerous flaws usually appear where context, trust boundaries, and business logic matter.
How important are certifications versus hands-on skills in cybersecurity?
Certifications are useful, but only when they reflect real capability. A certification can help open doors, but hands-on skill is what gets you trusted once you walk through them. That is why I prefer practical certifications that simulate real audits and require real reporting over multiple-choice trivia. In cybersecurity, performance matters more than memorization. The best certification is one that validates what you can actually do under realistic conditions.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Absolutely, and thank you for the thoughtful questions. To your community, I’d say this: stay practical. Use tools, use frameworks, use AI when it helps, but never stop testing assumptions against real systems. Security is not about looking secure; it’s about measurably reducing risk. If our public reports, free workshops, audits, or training help more people move in that direction, then I’m very happy about that.
