About us

Zero day engineering as a concept represents creating of previously unknown technology with a high power potential. In the narrow sense of computer security, it stands for research and development of cutting edge offensive technologies that bypass all the defenses, by design. The latter is commonly achieved by contsructing an arbitrary code logic on top of a suitable security bug in a target system, and then chaining multiple such constructs to the final objective – an exploit.

Modern software vulnerability research is a blossoming industry, represented with public security bounty programs and in-house offensive research teams funded by the world's leading software vendors, international competitions with cash rewards, and major governmental grants. We like to indulge in the complex, dynamic, and highly adversarial nature of challenges in this space, while sharing the knowledge and insights collected in the process in an ethically neutral way.

The Zero Day Engineering LLC was founded by Alisa Esage, a multi-specialized low-level hacker and researcher. Alisa taught herself assembly language and reverse engineering at age 15, worked professionally as a malware analyst at age 19, and owned a boutique infosec services company at age 25, before finally finding her passion in the art of zero day vulnerability research and advanced exploit engineering.

Today Alisa Esage is a top offensive security researcher who works independently, specializing on cutting edge vulnerability research in hypervisors & firmware systems. She is a winner of the iconic Pwn2Own 2021 Vancouver competition, and a lazy participant of top-tier security bounty programs payed by dominant software vendors such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Alisa is the brain behind all Zero Day Engineering trainings and products.

"Zero day engineering is my favorite e-sport, I can't live without it. It gives my brain all the food that I struggled to find in other occupations. I created Zero Day Engineering LLC to share my passion and my knowledge with others."

"Zero day engineering is 10% tools, 30% creative technical research of the unknowns, and 60% mindset: strategic analysis, advanced cognitive skills, and being extremely agile. That's why I like it. You have to be more than just a highly skilled hacker and more than an intelligent business mind to succeed in this in the long haul. It's a constant call of the evolution."

Core principle of Zero Day Engineering: always see the root of things. As all knowledge in the world is structured hierarchically, it is possible to embrace an enourmous scope of it by focusing on the foundation basis, and then making it practical for specialized applications.

Such a deep-and-wide systematical perspective enables us to know a lot, solve complex problems in unexpectedly elegant ways, introduce novel solutions that are simple yet effective, and easily transcend illusory boundaries of topics, specializations, and entire industries.

Regardless of the fashionable cyber buzzword of the moment, there exist only two possible root causes of any security compromise: technical systems vulnerabilities, and human vulnerabilities. As global trends in technology move to eliminate human factors while accelerating technical ones, deep expertize on technical systems vulnerabilities is becoming a critical point in all technological developments.

The answer to this is knowledge. Instead of leveraging the expertise to build yet another defensive system that we know first hand will be attacked and bypassed, we develop raw intelligence products covering the primordial knowledge gap that enables the existence of vulnerabilities and exploits in the first place.

All our products are specially crafted and exceptional, based on genuine insights from beyond the edges of the known, and aim to actually solve problems rather than introducing new ones. And we expect our customers, students, and brand ambassadors to share our values.