AI Systems Engineering
Agents, RAG pipelines, LLM integrations, and document automation, taken from idea to production. 20+ systems shipped end-to-end: self-hosted, Dockerised, and built to run every day, not to demo once.
I build AI systems. Then I secure them.
I’m Nick Falshaw. I’ve shipped 20+ production AI systems, agents, RAG pipelines, and document automation, and I’ve spent 17+ years securing enterprise networks in banking, automotive, manufacturing, and regulated infrastructure. Building AI and securing AI are usually two hires. Here they’re one.
LIVE
17 years, distilled
$ whoami Nick Falshaw, AI Engineer & AI Security Consultant $ cat focus.txt AI systems engineering AI security engineering Firewall automation at scale Cloud, zero trust & ISO 27001 $ cat creds.txt AI-102 · AZ-500 · AZ-700 · SC-500 · SC-200 · SC-100 · Terraform 004 · ISO 27001 LI · CEH · TOGAF 9 · CCIE Sec (written) $ _
What does an AI security consultant actually do?
Two jobs, usually at the same time: build the AI system, then secure it and prove it in audit. Seventeen years close to production sit behind that — agents and pipelines that ship, controls that survive production pressure, and the evidence for both. Firewall automation and ISO 27001 stay in the toolkit.
AI Security Engineering
Agents take action, RAG pipelines expose context, and MCP servers expand the attack surface. I threat-model agentic systems, lock down ingestion, and harden self-hosted LLM stacks before they reach production.
Firewall Automation
Vendor-agnostic change automation grounded in 280+ real migrations across Palo Alto, Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, and F5. Rule sets that survive audit, segmentation that holds, and automation that removes the human bottleneck.
Cloud & Zero Trust
Identity-first security for Azure and hybrid estates: conditional access, segmentation, and least privilege, prioritised by the risk each control actually removes rather than the logo on the box.
ISO 27001 & Compliance
ISO 27001 from gap analysis through certification, plus NIS2 and DORA readiness for regulated sectors. Passing the audit is the easy part, the goal is a programme that still holds the day something breaks.
Proven, not slideware
Every claim here is backed by delivery: production systems, real migrations, and audit evidence from regulated environments. A track record you can probe before we speak.
20+production AI systems shipped
17+years in enterprise cyber
280+firewall migrations delivered
Seventeen years close to production.
Production firewalls, regulated audits, and AI systems shipped end-to-end, the record, not the pitch.
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2025, now
Independent AI Engineer & AI Security Consultant
Building and securing AI systems: agents, RAG pipelines, and document automation on the build side, agentic threat modelling and self-hosted LLM hardening on the defence side. Firewall automation and ISO 27001 programmes for regulated estates.
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2010, 2025
Senior / Lead Network Security Contractor
Fifteen years contracting into DAX and enterprise environments, banking, automotive, manufacturing, payments and the public sector. Delivered 280+ firewall migrations and the security architecture behind them, multi-vendor and audit-ready.
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earlier
Network & Security Engineering
Enterprise routing, switching and perimeter security, the grounding that seventeen years of firewall, compliance and now AI-security work is built on.
Certifications
AI-102, Azure AI Engineer
AZ-500, Azure Security Engineer
AZ-700, Azure Network Engineer
AWS Security Specialty (SCS-C03)
SC-500, Cloud and AI Security Engineer
SC-200, Security Operations Analyst
SC-100, Cybersecurity Architect
Terraform Associate (004), HashiCorp
AI-900, Azure AI Fundamentals
ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
CEH, Certified Ethical Hacker
TOGAF 9
CCSP (Cisco)
CCIE Security (written)
CCNP
CCDP
CCSA · CCSE (Check Point)
JNCIA-FWV · JNCIS-FWV (Juniper)
Palo Alto EDU-201/205/311/121 (training)
F5 BIG-IP LTM
ITIL v3 Foundation
How do you bring in an AI security engineer?
Three ways, and most engagements start as one of them and grow from there: a scoped AI and security review, building the system itself, or firewall and segmentation work. Fixed scope where it helps, retained where the work is ongoing.
AI & security review
Threat-model an AI system or audit a network estate: agents, RAG pipelines, MCP servers, firewalls, and identity. You get a prioritised findings report with fixes ranked by the risk each one removes, not a checklist.
Build the system
Design and ship the AI workload end to end: agents, retrieval, and document automation, self-hosted and hardened before it reaches production. Built to run every day, with the security baked in rather than bolted on.
Firewall & segmentation
Vendor-agnostic firewall automation and migration grounded in 280+ real projects across Palo Alto, Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, and F5. Rule sets that survive audit and segmentation that actually holds.
Code on GitHub
The tooling behind the work, MIT licensed: vendor playbooks and migration runbooks for Claude Code, a locked-down LLM gateway, a routing lab, and offline voice dictation.
See the reposField notes.
Practical writing on firewalls, compliance, and shipping AI systems that survive real users.
Freelance Projects Up 5.3 % on 2025, IT Still 16 % Below Q1
freelance.de Q3 2026: projects up 5.3 % on the year, but IT's share fell from 33.4 % to 28.9 %. Where the growth went, read from a firewall contractor's seat.
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EU Platform Work Directive: A Check for IT Freelancers
The EU platform work directive must be German law by 2 December 2026 and no German draft is public yet. How IT freelancers check whether their agency counts.
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E-Rechnung for IT Freelancers: What to Do by 2027 and 2028
German e-invoicing for IT contractors: the €800,000 rule, why your December 2026 invoice is the first deadline, agency Gutschriften, timesheets and formats.
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NIS2 Supplier Clauses: What Freelance Contractors Sign
NIS2 rarely binds a one-person contractor, but § 30 BSIG reaches you through the client's supplier annex. The five clauses, what to sign, what to push back on.
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Missed the NIS2 Deadline? How to Register with the BSI Now
Missed the 31 July NIS2 deadline? How to register with the BSI now: ELSTER certificate, portal data, the €500,000 fine and what registration leaves open.
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How to Become an IT Freelancer in Germany: A Field Guide
Going freelance in IT in Germany: Freiberufler or Gewerbe, ELSTER registration, VAT, insurance, the project list agencies expect and where to upload it.
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Federal IT Security in Germany, Checked by Questionnaire
The BSI checked 15 federal bodies on site in two years; over 200 more report on themselves. Why a self-assessment measures paperwork, not the rule base.
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Lünendonk: 70% of IT Buyers Negotiate AI Discounts on Hourly Billing
Buyers already ask IT providers for AI discounts on time-and-material work. Why a security contractor keeps the rate by selling defined results, not hours.
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Freelancer-Kompass 2026: Why Freelance Projects Stall on the Client Side
43% of freelancers had no secured work, and 42% cite clients without decision authority. Why, in firewall projects, the scarce resource is the sign-off, not the engineer.
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Germany's Spy Law Reform Has No Zero-Day Rule for Your Firewall
The BND may soon switch off hostile servers, and no law says when a hole it holds in your firewall gets reported. Why the edge now has to assume it is already breached.
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Statusfeststellung Reform: Legal Certainty at 16.74% of the Fee
The draft offers a safe self-employed status if the client withholds 16.74% for the state pension. Why the one mandatory criterion is the one security contractors fail.
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Twenty Years of Experience Is Worth €23 an Hour
Under five years bills €83.41, over twenty bills €106.81, and years five to ten are worth €1.44. Why the stable rate headline hides the number that actually moved.
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The German Consulting Market Is Sorting, Not Shrinking
Top-20 growth halved to 4.1%, six firms shrank and one grew 26.4%. A 45-point spread in a flat market, and the detail that undercuts the industry’s own AI pitch.
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German Cloud Exit: Everyone Wants It, Nobody Tested It
85% of German firms call themselves too dependent on US cloud, 71% still buy it and only 8% prefer it. Why that gap is an untested exit cost, and the two-week test that turns it into a number.
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Why 95% of Enterprise AI Pilots Die at the Security Review
Three independent 2026 studies found 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable return. The model is rarely the reason. Where they actually die is the security review, and the 80 percent of the work nobody scoped.
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Shadow AI: Your Best People Are Hiding Their AI Use
Two thirds of office staff use AI their employer never approved, and 72% think they understand it better than the team governing it. Why the policy, not the people, is the failure, and where the hard line actually belongs.
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OpenAI Paused Astra for Safety. Then Said It Never Paused.
OpenAI paused training after its own agent hacked Hugging Face, then said Astra never stopped. What a self-declared safety threshold is worth.
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Benchmark Theater: Kimi K3 and the 51% Number They Left Out
The biggest open-weight model ever topped the leaderboards and omitted a 51% hallucination rate. Why benchmark theater is compliance theater, and how to evaluate AI models the way an auditor evaluates controls.
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JadePuffer: Ransomware With No Human at the Keyboard
The first ransomware run entirely by an AI agent, foothold to encryption, no operator. It went from failed login to working fix in 31 seconds. What breaks when the adversary's tempo and cost both collapse.
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Your AI Coding Tool Was Profiling You. The Real Lesson Is About Trust.
A researcher found Claude Code quietly fingerprinting users and phoning markers home. The scandal is not Anthropic. It is that you gave a vendor agent root on your codebase and never audited the trust.
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The Security Controls That Pass the Audit and Do Nothing
The unread access review, the log-only WAF, the phishing-completion metric, the rubber-stamp firewall review, the regex "guardrail". Controls that pass audit and stop nothing, and how to test effectiveness instead of existence.
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The Credential Is Dead. Long Live Continuous Verification.
16 billion credentials leaked and stolen sessions walk past MFA. Possession stopped proving identity. The fix is continuous verification, at the firewall and the AI agent alike.
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AI Agents Are the Service Accounts That Learned to Think
AI agents are non-human identities with standing access. After 17 years cleaning up orphaned firewall rules, the sprawl, and the cure, are familiar.
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The Autonomous AI Attacker Arrived. It Won in Under an Hour.
An AI agent ran a real intrusion end to end, foothold to data exfiltration, in under an hour with no human. What it breaks for defenders.
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Two Authentication Bypasses, One Bug Class: The VPN Edge and the AI Stack
A Check Point VPN zero-day and the BadHost flaw in Starlette are the same CWE-287 mistake, one stack apart: trusting attacker-controlled input to authenticate.
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From CVSS to ASR: Putting a Number on AI Agent Risk
For 17 years I scored security risk in CVSS. Anthropic just gave AI agents their own number: a 31.5% prompt-injection hijack rate. The risk discipline transfers.
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Prompt Injection Is a Confused-Deputy Problem We Already Solved
Prompt injection is a confused-deputy attack: the agent spends its own authority for an attacker. Network security solved that with trust boundaries, not smarter parsing.
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The Firewall CVE and the AI-Agent Breach Are the Same Mistake
A root-RCE firewall CVE and a poisoned AI-agent skill marketplace share one root cause: no provenance, no least privilege, no change control.
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OWASP LLM Top 10: 5 Critical AI Vulnerabilities for 2026
Where production LLM systems break first, based on mapping the OWASP LLM Top 10 against real codebases.
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Zero Trust Mittelstand: A Pragmatic 90-Day Plan
Zero Trust for the Mittelstand, not the Fortune 500: identity, segmentation, and continuous verification without a full rebuild.
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Mittelstand NIS2: Why German SMEs Are Dangerously Unprepared
The backbone of Europe’s economy built its advantage through engineering, not security. Here is what BSI deadlines require and how to close the gap.
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What 17 Years of Enterprise Security Compliance Taught Me
Hundreds of assessments across TISAX, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and NIS2, plus the lessons that do not appear in any framework.
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AI Threat Detection: 7 Strategies for CISOs in 2026
How to reduce alert noise, find novel attacker behaviour, and turn detection maturity into evidence the board can understand.
ReadHow an engagement works.
The method stays consistent whether I’m building an AI system or securing one: evidence first, architecture second, implementation third, verification always.
01
Assess
Map what’s really deployed, topology, AI workloads, identity, threat surface, regulatory scope. Facts, not assumptions.
02
Architect
Design the target state and the path to it. AI controls and network defences on one blueprint, prioritised by risk and effort.
03
Implement
Build it: firewall automation, RAG controls, identity, and segmentation hardened against the vectors that actually land.
04
Verify
Prove it under real load. Useful alerting, owned runbooks, and audit evidence produced as part of delivery.
Ship AI you can
stand behind.
Building an AI system? Running one that’s never been threat-modelled? Still on firewalls and ISO 27001? Tell me what you’re building or defending and what deadline matters. I reply within one business day.
Message sent.
You’ll get a real reply from me within one business day.