The consultant is the company.

Kara is a U.S. Navy veteran. She served as a close-access network operator and then as an all-source cyber intelligence analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence, which gave her an unusual end-to-end view of how intrusions are carried out, how they are detected, and what decision-makers actually need to know about them.

Since 2016 she has worked as a contractor across the Intelligence Community: building and deploying cyber-defence tooling for the IC Security Coordination Center at ODNI, leading engineering and DevSecOps teams at the Defense Intelligence Agency, designing a new mission system that replaced two legacy platforms and passed NIST SP 800-53 accreditation in eight months, and briefing senior IC leadership on zero trust and software supply-chain risk.

She also writes software because she likes to. rIRCd, an IRC server in Rust, and Switchboard, its desktop client, are hers, along with the tooling behind her own sites.

That combination is the point. She has been the engineer who builds the system, the security engineer who accredits it, and the analyst who studies the people trying to break it. It is why the security advice from Ivy Bells is implementable and the software it builds is safe by default — and why the person you talk to is the person who does the work.

She writes and builds in the open at karazajac.io.