Network Vulnerability Scripts

The problem

A university network is a lot of machines, and checking them for known vulnerabilities by hand doesn’t scale — not because any single check is hard, but because there are too many of them and they have to happen again next week.

What I did

I wrote Python scripts with the IT department to help diagnose vulnerabilities across university systems and support patching them. The work was less about clever code than about being careful: these scripts ran against production infrastructure that students and staff were actively using, so the cost of a mistake was real in a way that coursework never is.

I’m keeping this write-up general on purpose. Specifics about a university’s network posture aren’t mine to publish, even a couple of years on.

What I took from it

This was my first time writing software that other people depended on, and the first time I had to think about the blast radius of something I’d written rather than just whether it produced the right answer. It’s also where I learned how much of an IT department’s job is work nobody notices until it stops happening.