Hi, I’m Viola Lykova
Speaking and workshops
I speak about authentication, testing and cloud security for real world products.
I am available for meetups, conferences, internal tech sessions and webinars in London, across the UK and online.
- Your auth tests are lying to you
- Testing real Cognito Hosted UI flows with Cypress
- Secure frontend architecture in regulated environments
- Short lived tokens, cookies and session expiry in modern SPAs
- What QA and devs both miss about auth and security
FIELD NOTES
Incident playbooks you can actually use
Short, production-grade case files on AWS, identity, and reliability. Written to help you debug faster, ship safer, and sound credible in design reviews.
- CloudTrail investigations and IAM rollback patterns
- Cognito Hosted UI debugging without guesswork
- ECS task roles, permissions, and AccessDenied triage
RECENT WORK
Case studies
Real systems, real tradeoffs. Short reads that show how I think in production.
SnappyCart
A lightweight React cart component built for fast integration, predictable state, and production-grade UX.
View case study
Nuclecode System Design
Architecture work on scalable AWS-backed systems, with caching strategy, service boundaries, and CI/CD flows.
View case study
Enterprise E-commerce Platform
Multi-region and high-availability e-commerce design with real-time inventory constraints and CDN strategy.
View case study
DEEP DIVES
Technical Deep-Dives
Practical writeups that read like incident notes. Minimal fluff, maximum signal.
Network Traffic Analysis – The Spyware Hunter’s Approach
Using Wireshark, NetGuard, and other sniffing tools. Identifying suspicious IPs and unusual outbound traffic. Setting up a Pi-hole or DNS filter to block known malicious domains.
Read more →Bootloader, Secure Boot, and Locking It Down
What a bootloader is and why it matters. How to check if it’s unlocked and the risks involved. Locking it down properly to prevent further tampering.
Read more →Advanced Persistent Threats
Detecting hidden partitions, encrypted volumes, and rootkits. Using tools like Magisk, Chkrootkit, and rkhunter for deeper scans. Case study of a real-world spyware attack.
Read more →
ACTIVENetwork Traffic Analysis – The Spyware Hunter’s Approach