Naked CyberSec: Trust Starts with Knowing Who I Am
You made your bed — now lie in it.
That’s the English way of saying what Russians call “Назвался груздем – полезай в кузов”. If you name your thing “Naked”, be ready to show everything as it is. No hiding.
My story started long before I ever touched a computer. In 1936, thousands of Poles and Germans from the border regions of Ukraine (mostly Volyn and Zhytomyr) were deported to Kazakhstan by order of the Soviet government. They were loaded into freight trains with only an hour to pack. Their past was erased in one trip.
One of those trains carried my grandfather – a little Polish boy – and his family. They ended up in Labor Settlement No. 12 of Karlag (now the village of Pervomayka in Akmola Region, Kazakhstan).
Karlag was one of the biggest agricultural camps in the Gulag system. At its peak, it covered almost 1.8 million hectares with hundreds of small points, farms, and sites.
People survived in the endless steppe, built farms, and raised children. My grandfather made it through. Despite his “unreliable” background, he finished a railway college, married a doctor (my grandmother), and in 1955 my father Alexander was born in the same Akmola Region.
I was born on July 27, 1988, in Stepnogorsk – a completely closed town that wasn’t even on public maps until the late 1980s. The main factories were the Central Mining and Chemical Plant (uranium mining and processing) and the Progress plant (where they developed components for biological weapons in Soviet times). After the USSR collapsed, the city suffered hard in the 1990s: factories closed, people left. My family moved too – first to Moscow Region, then to Moscow in 2000.
I loved computers from early childhood. We got an 286 PC – the second one in the whole town – when I was four years old. That decided my path. I went to College of Information Technologies, and later chose university in cybersecurity – back then it seemed the most romantic field in IT.
University was brutal: 5-6 exams twice a year, constant stress, math, physics, philosophy, database and network security, low-level and high-level programming, tons of paper-based security rules, and basics of cyber warfare. My fuel was five Ritter Sport chocolates a day. Languages were hard, but math and history always came easy.
After graduation I started as a security administrator in a big bank. A couple of years later I realized I wanted to work more with people than with machines. I moved to system integration. Over the years in Russia I worked at well-known vendor companies: Kaspersky, Positive Technologies, Garda Technologies, Solar Security. I traveled all over the country – from Kaliningrad to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and many times to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on business trips.
Everything was going fine until 2022, when the war started. I left — first to Kyrgyzstan, then to Kazakhstan. I got a residence permit and applied for Polish citizenship through repatriation. In 2025 I finally returned to the homeland of my ancestors.
Why am I telling you this long personal story?
Because this blog is called Naked CyberSec. After 15+ years in the field, I’m deeply convinced: real cybersecurity is impossible without trust.
Everything we build – Zero Trust architectures, immutable snapshots, AI enterprise infrastructure – rests on trust. Even in Zero Trust the second word is still trust. Trust, but verify. I know who I am. Now you know too.
This blog is my way of being completely open. No masks. With a history that goes through the Gulag, deportations, closed uranium cities, to today — living in Prague as a digital nomad with my dog Diego.
Stay naked. To be continued...
Michail Domalewski