Prof. Dr. Emir Halilović

Prof. Dr. Emir Halilović is the Founding Professor of Ethical Hacking at ICS AI University and a permanent member of the academic faculty of the School of Cyber Security, reporting to the Dean of the School. He holds canonical academic ownership of the University's offensive security curriculum and is the named academic authority for every Level 3 Ethical Hacking module delivered by the University.

Born in Sarajevo and educated in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria and the United Kingdom, Prof. Halilović holds Bosnian nationality and teaches in English, Bosnian, German and Turkish. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computing from the University of Sarajevo, a Master of Science in Information Security from TU Wien, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Offensive Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, where his doctoral research addressed reproducible exploitation methodology and evidence integrity in penetration testing.

He spent sixteen years in industry before returning full time to academia — as a penetration tester for a European telecommunications group, then lead red team operator for a Vienna-based security consultancy, and finally as Head of Offensive Security for a pan-European banking group, where he owned red team strategy, purple team integration, vulnerability management and the group's responsible-disclosure programme.

Across fifteen years of university teaching he has taught offensive security to more than nine thousand learners, designed four accredited ethical hacking curricula, and supervised nine doctoral candidates. He is widely known for insisting that every exploit be preceded by written authorisation, a documented scope, and a plan for how the finding will be remediated.

His research programme spans reproducible exploitation methodology, web and API attack surface analysis, wireless and mobile penetration testing, adversary emulation, and capture-the-flag pedagogy. He has authored sixty-one peer-reviewed publications, a practitioner handbook on lawful penetration testing, and maintains an open, deliberately vulnerable laboratory range used by universities in eleven countries.

Prof. Halilović serves on international ethics and accreditation panels for offensive security education and advises national CERT programmes on coordinated vulnerability disclosure. He is a member of IEEE, ACM and ISACA, holds OSCP, OSWE, CRTO, GPEN and CISSP, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.