About

Ventral Digital LLC is a research and consultancy firm specializing in Information Security and Privacy.

The term ventral (ven-truhl; of or relating to the venter or belly; abdominal.) is conventionally used in medical context. To us, it represents the excitement and seemingly endless flow of energy one experiences when both the intellectual and primal interests are in alignment.

Patrick Drotleff (patrickd)

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Patrick is an Independent Security Researcher and Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of hands-on experience shipping and hardening production systems. Known for his methodical thoroughness and high standards, Patrick gravitates toward campaign-driven work: Dive deep, map and capture the domain, ship unconventional artifacts, repeat. He has contributed to developer ecosystems, mentored engineers and researchers, and delivered security reviews across Web2 and Web3.

Since 2026	LLM/Agentic Security Research Agent benchmarking, optimization, and hardening Scaling complex reasoning processes Defending against slop bug submissions
2021 - 2026	Independent Security Researcher in Web3/Blockchain #Solidity #Vyper #Yul #Assembly #Fuzzing #Echidna #Slither #Foundry #Hardhat #Truffle Secureum Bootcamp Mentor and Epoch 0 alumni Security Research Contractor at Cantina's Spearbit Guild Audited projects such as Cozy Finance, Paladin, Art Gobblers, and SushiSwap Consultant/vCISO for Optimism's Bedrock upgrade
2018 - 2021	Freelance Senior Backend/DevOps Engineer #AWS #Azure #Serverless #Lambda #S3 #Kubernetes Specialized in refactoring, migration, and design of SaaS APIs with cloud services Organized company internal CTF challenges for developers
2016 - 2018	SaaS/JS Senior Backend Developer, DevOps, full-time @ maloon GmbH #ELK #ElasticSearch #Logstash #Kibana Specialized in research, prototyping, and quality/security reviews Responsible for evaluation of applicant developers
2013 - 2016	SaaS/JS Backend Developer, DevOps, part-time student @ maloon GmbH #CoffeeScript #JavaScript #TypeScript #MongoDB #NodeJS #MongoDB #ElasticSearch #RabbitMQ #Redis Implemented data synchronization services between various databases Implemented web crawlers for sales lead generation processes
2011 - 2013	Drupal/PHP Developer, DevOps, part-time student @ maloon GmbH #Drupal #PHP #nginx #Apache2 #SUExec #haproxy #LXC Research & Development of Social Media synchronization MVPs Mentor in the Drupal Community and responsible for security/quality reviews of contributed plugins Created various online tools, such as simplytest.me, easing the testing and review of Drupal patches and modules
2011	Bachelor of Science in Information Technology @ TH Ingolstadt #LaTeX #JavaScript #PHP #Perl #Java #C #Assembly #WebGL #SQL #GWT #LUA Game design with Löve engine, mobile game optimization Thesis on SaaS API design