Farhad Rahimli

Farhad is a Senior Application Security Specialist at Legal & General and holds an MSc in Computing and Security from King's College London. He recently coached the Azerbaijani school team at the International Cybersecurity Olympiad (ICO) in Tunisia, running national selection rounds, mentoring students online and building the training portal used throughout preparation.

He created cyberlearner.org, a free learning portal covering ICO curriculum, theory and CTF labs, and teaches school-age students toward CTF competitions and practical application security skills.

Farhad Rahimli brings together professional application security experience and hands-on competition coaching. By day he works as a Senior Application Security Specialist at Legal & General, securing containerised applications and platforms. His academic background includes an MSc in Computing and Security from King's College London, with earlier degrees in computer engineering and information security from Azerbaijan Technical University.

Farhad's competition work is unusually end to end. As deputy team leader for Azerbaijan at ICO, he ran national selection (online and on-site CTF rounds), coached students through the year, built training material and maintained the online learning portal used during selection and at the Olympiad itself. He understands what it takes to identify strong students, prepare them under time pressure and balance theory with practical hacking exercises.

For UK students, Farhad is a strong fit for cybersecurity and programming tuition aimed at Capture The Flag competitions, the International Cybersecurity Olympiad pathway and broader application security foundations. The ideal age group is roughly Years 11-13: students who already enjoy problem-solving and want to move from general coding into security thinking, reverse engineering, web exploitation, cryptography and defensive practice.

Lessons can draw on his portal at cyberlearner.org, which covers ICO-style curriculum, theory notes and CTF labs. Students learn to work like competitors: reading documentation, chaining vulnerabilities, writing clear reports and building durable study notes they can use under exam conditions.

Farhad's aim is not only to prepare students for a single competition, but to build genuine security intuition: how systems fail, how attackers think, and how to defend software and infrastructure with discipline and curiosity.