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Hi, My name is Aftab Sama! 👋I'm a cybersecurity researcher. I graduated from Rashtriya Raksha University with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering with specialization in Cyber Security. My interest in Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions helped me secure my first internship at KPMG India, as I was among the top performers in a national CTF competition organized by the KPMG Cyber Security Team. I secured an on-campus internship at Quick Heal, where I had the opportunity to shadow various malware cases and learn about the investigation process. I validated Indicators of Compromise (IoC) for physical samples from CertIN and OTX, and I utilized my Python skills to automate some daily tasks. I also ranked among the top 100 in TCS HackQuest Season 7 Capture the Flag (CTF) competition, which led to an employment opportunity with TCS, where I am currently working as Penetration Tester.My passion for offensive security and penetration testing led me to obtain certifications such as CAPenX, BSCP, CNPen, CAPen, and CEH Practical, among others. I plan to enroll in further offensive security courses in the future.In my free time, I actively participate on HackTheBox and CTFTime and have taken part in several prestigious CTF competitions, winning multiple prizes. Besides my interest in security, I enjoy reading about stoicism and philosophy.You can read my blogs and writeups at https://aftabsama.com.

Alon Friedman is a Principal Security Architect at Microsoft 365 Defender, with extensive experience in application security and penetration testing. He focuses on defining application security standards and researching threat landscapes. His background includes leading secure software development at Salesforce and managing application vulnerabilities at PayPal. Alon is a recognized researcher, credited with CVE-2014-4246 and the creation of the SCIP OWASP ZAP extension

Speaker at multiple International Security conferences: NullCon, AVAR Singapore, AVAR Chennai, Bsides Delhi. Did first lock picking workshop in India with Nullcon in 2012 and multiple lock picking workshops in Nullcon , Hackers conference.  Did workshop on Arduino in NullCon hackers conference and created first ever Hardware badge in India for Hackers conference.

Andreas Wiegenstein is engaged in SAP cyber security since 2003. He discovered quite a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in SAP software and supported development of a market leading static code analysis tool for the business programming language ABAP. He has spoken at more than 70 conferences world-wide about SAP security, including Black Hat, DeepSec, Hack In The Box, IT Defense, RSA, SAP TechEd and Troopers (alphabetical order). His current research is focused on SAP malware and supply chain attacks.

As an ethical hacker, I equip enterprises with the advice and solutions to improve their digital security posture and their overall business growth. Throughout my career as an ethical hacker I’ve worked across several industries including:💥 Government💥 Advertising💥 Retail💥 Financial Services💥 Blockchain💥 Technology💥 Publishing💥 Non-Profit💥 And more!This has provided me the opportunities to gain a breadth of knowledge on all things security testing.

Donavan is a Physics graduate turned into cybersecurity consultant with >8 years of experience in a variety of cybersecurity domains (e.g. offensive security, threat modeling, maturity assessments, security architecture) and business domains (cyber GRC).He blends his understanding of clients across both public and private sectors to identify key cybersecurity concerns and solutions to enable companies' cybersecurity compliance, confidence and cost-effectiveness (3 Cs).He has numerous contributions to the cybersecurity community since 2018. He has written hacking challenges, spoken at numerous conferences and events (SECCON JP, Threat Modeling Connect Japan, GCC 2025 @ Taiwan, Seasides 2025 @ Goa, SINCCON @ Singapore, DefCamp @ Romania) on topics ranging from threat modeling to application security. He has conducted career talks to encourage younger students from middle school to university levels to enter the cybersecurity industry. He also sits on the advisory board of VULNCON (since 2024), BSides Mumbai and Vazig, and has authored numerous articles on ISACA on topics ranging from post-quantum cryptography, to the relations between social sciences and cybersecurity as well as threat modelling. His views on cybersecurity has also been quoted by "The Pentester Blueprint" written by Phillip L. Wylie and Kim Crawley, and Offensive Security. He also contributes to the ISC2's Unified Body of Knowledge (UBK) through the Technical Advisory Panel Workshop.In Thales, he has also led a team to create a made in Singapore cybersecurity gamification experience, "Defend the Breach" (DTB), in three months, where players role-play CISO roles to make difficult cybersecurity decisions, taking into account both cyber and non-cyber factors such as the overall health of the business, manpower and operational requirements.Donavan also possesses certifications ranging from Offsec certifications (OSCE3, OSCP), ISC2 (CISSP), ISACA (CRISC) and is more than halfway through his Masters in Cybersecurity at Georgia Tech (OMSCY).On the mentorship front, he has developed and helped two mentees secure jobs, and mentors a dozen mentees in various capacities (individuals, cyber start-up founders)Outside cybersecurity, Donavan has also represented Singapore in international forums such as the ASEAN-India Youth Summit as a delegate.Find out more about me at https://donavan.sg and my cybersecurity writing at https://donavan.sg/blog.

Evan "Shortrange" Cook is a physical security researcher who is passionate about hacking the planet! A first-place winner of the DEFCON 2025 Embedded Systems Village CTF and SAINTCON 2024 RFID CTF, Evan knows how to train and speak success in RFID hacking. He is a battle-tested educator who has workshopped over 300+ students — ranging from newbies to industry professionals to tier-one special forces operators — in the art of successful access control exploitation. Committed to lowering the barrier of entry for beginners, he created the world's FIRST open-source access control simulation lab built entirely with off-the-shelf parts, proving that high-end security research doesn't require a high-end budget. Evan is passionate about "bringing RFID to the people" through talks, workshops, trainings, and open-source projects. Where digital and physical worlds collide... you'll find Shortrange ready to "Hack the Planet!" with you.

I spoke at about a dozen conferences so far, mostly always about Software Supply Chain Security / Application Security. I am a regular guest on several podcasts on the same topic as well. I spoke in front of small (a few dozen) and large audiences (several hundreds) both locally and internationally (North America and Western Europe). I spoke at BlackHat SecTor, OWASP Global AppSec, NorthSec, Linux Foundation's OpenSSF event, Munich Cyber TTP, etc.

Dr. Gregory Carpenter is Principal Partner at CW PENSEC and a retired U.S. Army officer with over two decades of operational experience spanning intelligence, counterintelligence, electronic warfare, deception, and security testing. He previously served in senior roles across joint and interagency environments and was recognized as NSA Operations Officer of the Year for his work in advanced operational analysis and mission execution.Dr. Carpenter’s professional focus centers on adversary modeling and the failure modes of trust, identity, and attribution under adaptive threat pressure. His work examines how emerging technologies—including cyber-physical systems, in vivo and nano-scale technologies, automation, and information operations—alter attacker behavior and invalidate long-standing defensive assumptions. He has led and advised offensive and defensive programs across cyber, information, and electronic warfare domains, with particular emphasis on how identity collapses when human operators are no longer stable or external to the systems they access.At conferences and in research settings, Dr. Carpenter translates complex adversary behavior into practical defensive insight, emphasizing how organizations must redesign identity, access control, and trust models for environments where compromise is expected rather than exceptional. He has presented at DEF CON’s Misinformation Village (2023), Adversary Village (2025), and the DEF CON Creator Stage (2024, 2025).

Kirils Solovjovs is Latvia's leading white-hat hacker and IT policy activist, renowned for uncovering and responsibly disclosing critical security vulnerabilities in both national and international systems. Kirils started programming at age 7 and by grade 9 was spending his lunch breaks writing machine code directly in a hex editor.With deep expertise in network flow analysis, reverse engineering, social engineering, and penetration testing, he has significantly contributed to cybersecurity advancements. Notably, Kirils developed the jailbreak tool for MikroTik RouterOS and played a pivotal role in creating e-Saeima, enabling the Latvian Parliament to conduct a fully remote legislative process, the first of its kind globally.He currently serves as the lead researcher at Possible Security and as a research assistant at the Institute of Electronics and Computer Science.

Mohit Kulamkolly works at Netskope as an Security Analyst ll - Red team and Offensive Operations, a Santa Clara-based company that offers the Cloud Native Security Platform to assist enterprises secure their growing cloud footprint.He has been working with the Appsec division Pen-testing applications and product features for more than 4 years , in addition to making sure firms’ product development projects are secure. His particular areas of interest are binary exploitation, fuzzing, exploit development and reverse engineering. In his tenure at Netskope he has discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities within the Application and driven by passion for cutting edge research in his domain. An accomplished speaker, he presented at Black Hat Europe Arsenal 2025 and has delivered over 10+ technical presentations to a diverse range of product development disciplines within his current organization. His research has made contributions to the cyber security community including reporting CVE-2024-46455 and open source contributions.

Pramod Rana is author of below open source projects:Omniscient - LetsMapYourNetwork: a graph-based asset management framework CICDGuard - Orchestrating visibility and security of CICD ecosystem vPrioritizer - Art of Risk Prioritization: a risk prioritization frameworkHe has presented at BlackHat, defcon, nullcon, OWASPGlobalAppSec, HITB, CyberConAus, rootcon, AppSecNZ, HackMiami, HackInParis, CodeBlue and Insomnihack before. He is OWASP Pune chapter lead.He is leading the application security function in Netskope with primary focus on integrating security controls in the development process and providing security-testing-as-a-service to engineering teams.

I'm a security researcher with a passion for OS internals and all things low-level. Over the years I have specialised in Android & the Linux kernel, but have dabbled in a number of domains. When I'm not figuring out how things work and breaking them, I love to share my experiences and help others; whether it's via my blog, talks or mentoring.

I got into cybersecurity the messy, curious way - hacking games as a teenager to get extra coins and superpowers, then later reverse-engineering ransomwares to understand how they worked. That same curiosity and passion led me to a career in offensive cyber security.In the past 5+ years of work experience across India, UAE & USA, I’ve worked on:• Mobile application penetration testing (Android & iOS)• Web application and API penetration testing• Secure code review across C/C++, Python, Java, Golang, JavaScript, Typescript and C# .NET• Custom Signature Code Analysis (Semgrep, YARA & Coverity CodeXM custom checkers)• Adverserial tradecraft and Cyber threat intelligence• Network and infrastructure assessments with Segmentation penetration tests for cloud and on-prem setups• Software Composition Analysis (Coverity, Black Duck, GitHub Advisories, PlexTrac)• Innovative research & automated pentest tools development (AI, OSINT, Python, Bash script)Currently, I work as a Security Researcher at OnDefend, where I help secure user data of a large-scale social media platform & contribute to U.S. national security.🌟 Key Achievements:• Awarded the first-ever “Magical Mention” as an intern at Equinix for uncovering and reporting multiple critical security misconfigurations. Recognized for investigative persistence, curiosity, and successfully improving internal security workflows through proactive analysis and alerting.• Bug Bounty & Hall of Fame mentions: Tesco, IKEA, SecureLayer7 live hacking event, Accenture, Ericsson, Springer Nature, OSIsoft🔍CVE Research:• CVE-2020-11539 : Access control issue in Tata Sonata Smartwatch• CVE-2020-11540 : Access control issue in Tata Sonata Smartwatch• CVE-2020-25498 : Chained CSRF & Stored XSS vulnerabilities in Beetel router• CVE-2020-35262 : Stored XSS vulnerability in Digisol router👾 Outside of work, I’m always exploring new tools, ways to use AI as leverage in security, hacking techniques & trying to level up. I love building my own custom IoT devices as well as hacking them.🧑‍🤝‍🧑As an active member of 'Women in Cybersecurity', 'Women in Security & Privacy' and 'The Diana Initiative' volunteer at Defcon, I’m also passionate about making cyber security more inclusive and human, especially for women and underrepresented voices.

I spoke at CONFidence 2025, one of the most established infosec conferences in Central Europe. My talk focused on advanced API authorization vulnerabilities and practical exploitation techniques, drawing from real-world engagements. I’ve compressed years of pentesting and secure code review experience into research-driven content and I’m eager to bring more of that to the stage.

Vitaly Simonovich is a senior security researcher at Cato Networks and a member of Cato CTRL. Currently, Vitaly focuses on researching topics related to LLM security, with a particular emphasis on jailbreaks and prompt injections, as well as conducting vulnerability research across a wide range of technologies. In addition, he is actively involved in threat intelligence, analyzing emerging threats and attack trends to strengthen organizational defenses.Prior to joining Cato in 2023, Vitaly worked at Incapsula and Imperva, where he led teams of security analysts and researchers. With over nine years of experience in cybersecurity, Vitaly specializes in application security, data security, LLM security, vulnerability research, and threat intelligence.An active contributor to the cybersecurity community, Vitaly regularly publishes research blogs, hosts webinars, and presents at conferences. In addition to his professional work, he teaches cybersecurity at local colleges and enjoys solving CTF challenges in his free time to stay sharp and enhance his skills.