Euan Smith — cybersecurity and digital forensics student based in Dublin, Ireland

Ethical Hacker in Training|

BSc Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics · Technological University Dublin

Cybersecurity student in Dublin. Right now that means disinformation research with EDMO Ireland, a home lab, and more GitHub repos than free evenings. View CV

// about

I'm a cybersecurity student at Technological University Dublin. My work spans counter-disinformation research, AI automation, and hardware systems: a large-scale attribution study and a weekly fact-check pipeline for EDMO Ireland, automation tools that turn a profit, and home lab infrastructure that mirrors production environments.

I'm drawn to complex systems, how they fail, how they can be exploited, and how to make them resilient. I follow threads others overlook, sit with problems until patterns emerge, and rarely accept “that’s just how it works” as an answer.

CybersecurityLinuxPythonAI/MLNetworkingOSINTHardwareVirtualizationSystems AdminDigital Forensics

// timeline

Ten years, roughly

↓ Beginnings

Present ↑

2016

First Code

CoderDojo: Scratch game development, first exposure to programming logic

2018

STEM Camp

Trinity College Dublin STEM camp: Python fundamentals, physics simulations, algorithmic thinking

2020

Hardware Era

Built custom PC during COVID, game modding, console repair, hardware modification

2021

AI Experiments

First AI automation experiments, exploring generative tools and scripting

2023

Systems Depth

Linux home lab, virtualization, advanced AI projects, cybersecurity self-study

2026

EDMO & Research

Counter-disinformation research with EDMO Ireland; built fact-check automation pipeline; large-scale attribution study for a FIMI investigation; research project shared at DCU MA level

2026

TU Dublin

Began BSc (Hons) Digital Forensics & Cyber Security at TU Dublin, Blanchardstown

2016

First Code

CoderDojo: Scratch game development, first exposure to programming logic

2018

STEM Camp

Trinity College Dublin STEM camp: Python fundamentals, physics simulations, algorithmic thinking

2020

Hardware Era

Built custom PC during COVID, game modding, console repair, hardware modification

2021

AI Experiments

First AI automation experiments, exploring generative tools and scripting

2023

Systems Depth

Linux home lab, virtualization, advanced AI projects, cybersecurity self-study

2026

EDMO & Research

Counter-disinformation research with EDMO Ireland; built fact-check automation pipeline; large-scale attribution study for a FIMI investigation; research project shared at DCU MA level

2026

TU Dublin

Began BSc (Hons) Digital Forensics & Cyber Security at TU Dublin, Blanchardstown

European Commission Initiative

Host Institution

// experience

European Digital Media Observatory

Dublin City University · European Commission

Researcher & Freelance Contributor · June 2026 – Present

EDMO is the EU's hub for countering disinformation: a network of fact-checkers, academics, and researchers across every member state, with the Irish team based at DCU's FuJo Institute. I work with the Irish team as a researcher and freelance contributor.

→Delivered the data analysis for a foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) investigation: built the collection pipeline, normalised 25,300+ articles into structured datasets, and measured authorship and source attribution on a random sample with confidence intervals, alongside domain registration and hosting analysis across the network. Shipped as a ten-sheet workbook in which every published rate recomputes from the raw CSVs. EDMO passed the findings to academic and journalistic partners.
→Built and shipped EDMO Ireland's weekly fact-check round-up: it pulls new fact-checks, formats them to house style, and posts a draft to edmohub.ie through the WordPress REST API for an editor to review and publish. Runs unattended on GitHub Actions behind 59 tests, with scheduled canary checks that open an issue the moment the source site's markup changes.
→Verified and rebuilt an Irish media opinion dataset for an EDMO research team: parsed 287 opinion pieces into clean author-by-outlet counts across seven national titles, enriched a 197-person contributor roster, and found and corrected 15 defective record matches out of 72 before the data reached analysis.
→Wrote a Python client and CLI against Meta's official Ad Library API to measure advertising spend and volume across a set of news outlets, handling authentication, pagination, rate limits and schema normalisation. Documented the two fields the API genuinely cannot return rather than approximating them, and grounded the tool in the GDPR Article 89 research exemption and CDSM Article 3 rather than scraping around Meta's controls.
→Conducted original counter-disinformation research: a controlled two-account social media experiment documenting algorithmic radicalisation, plus an interview with EDMO Ireland's lead researcher on radical recruitment tactics, Digital Services Act enforcement gaps, and Big Tech's Dublin-based accountability failures. Presented to ~60 students, and shared by EDMO Ireland with Dr Eileen Culloty and Professor Jane Suiter at DCU, who are considering adapting it into an MA journalism module in 2027.
→RadicalMap, the extremist-network mapping instrument now published on Zenodo with a DOI, came out of this work and was shown to EDMO Ireland's lead researcher during project kickoff.

// policy

Policy & International Relations

Counter-disinformation is written into European law and funded through European programmes, so a lot of the work happens in rooms rather than repositories. These are the two I was selected into.

Council of Europe

Youth Facing Disinformation: Why Journalists Matter

Selected Participant · Strasbourg, November 2026

Selected through an open Europe-wide call, under the Journalists Matter campaign and the Monaco Presidency, alongside the Youth Department's Youth Revitalising Democracy project. Participants are drawn from the 46 member States.

The secretariat described the selection as drawing “a very high number of applications from across Europe, making the selection process particularly competitive”, assessed on the quality and relevance of the application, existing experience and expertise, and potential to act as a multiplier.
Day one is a high-level conference at the Palais de l'Europe with journalists, media professionals, researchers, policymakers and Council of Europe representatives.
Day two is participant-only workshops at the European Youth Centre Strasbourg on disinformation, media and information literacy, quality journalism and democratic resilience.

Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA)

ChangingTIDE Changemakers

Changemaker, Ireland team · Brussels, October 2026

One of four people representing Ireland, selected through a two-stage process from a multi-country field of applicants across EU member states. An EU-funded project under the European Commission's Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme, coordinated by TEPSA in Brussels with DCU's FuJo Institute as Irish partner.

The Ireland team co-creates a national campaign countering disinformation, information manipulation and foreign interference (FIMI).
Mentoring from Young European Leadership (YEL), ChangeLab sessions in Brussels, and meetings with MEPs.
Campaigns are brought into dialogue with policymakers at national and EU level.

// projects

What I've built

PythonAI AgentsSelf-HostedAutomation

NZT-48

A self-hosted personal AI system built on Claude Code: a Telegram interface, Obsidian-backed memory, and a set of background agents and monitors that handle briefings, research, and scheduling. Runs at zero marginal cost with no cloud dependency. My most-starred repository.

Active

GitHub Case study →

OSINTPythonNetwork AnalysisCounter-Disinformation

RadicalMap

A research instrument for detecting, classifying, and mapping extremist content networks on short-form video platforms using only publicly accessible metadata. Flags coded language, numerical dog whistles, and hidden capitalisation sequences that evade automated moderation, then visualises the results as an interactive network graph. Grounded in DSA Article 40 researcher-access provisions and the GDPR Article 89 research exemption.

Published on Zenodo with a DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22083807

Active

GitHub Case study →

Computer VisionPythonROI ModelingAutomation

Marketplace Intelligence System

Autonomous system that identifies resale opportunities across online marketplaces using computer vision and pricing intelligence. Incorporates ROI calculation, risk scoring, and human-in-the-loop decision gates. It's turned a profit, all of it donated to Merchants Quay Ireland.

Donated to Merchants Quay Ireland

Active

Case study →

PythonWeb SecurityXSSSecurity Tooling

Reflex

An educational Python toolkit for learning common web vulnerability classes: reflected and DOM-based XSS, open redirects, and a mutation fuzzer, with coloured output and HTML reports. Built to understand how these attacks actually work, not to run against live targets.

Complete

GitHub Case study →

— More underway —

// study