Vivek Ramachandran to Speak at Black Hat Asia's 2025 Financial Services Summit on the Evolving Cyber War Against State Actors

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Vivek Ramachandran, Founder of SquareX and a cybersecurity veteran with over two decades of experience, will speak at the Black Hat Asia Financial Services Summit on April 2 2025 at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. His talk, The War Against State Actors: Bleeding Edge Techniques Targeting Financial Services, will examine how nation-state attackers are evolving their tactics to infiltrate financial institutions and bypass enterprise security controls.

Vivek's session will deep dive into recent high-profile attacks, including Russia's Midnight Blizzard RDP exploit, North Korea's remote IT worker fraud, and China's Storm-0940 password spray campaigns. He will outline how these adversaries are exploiting trusted binaries, hosted on trusted domains, and using advanced data exfiltration techniques to bypass key components of the enterprise security stack, including Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE/SSE), and endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems.

"Financial institutions remain one of the most highly targeted industries, with state-backed actors leading the pack when it comes to developing new attack techniques," said Vivek Ramachandran Founder and CEO of SquareX, "Thus, it is absolutely critical to understand what state-backed threat actors are doing to comprehend how the threat landscape is evolving. Over the past year, we have witnessed multiple scenarios of state-backed attacks bypassing SASE/SSEs and EDRs with novel browser-native techniques, and it is only a matter of time before other attackers follow suit."

Held the day before Black Hat Asia's main conference, the Financial Services Summit brings together security leaders for a deep exploration  into the most pressing threats facing the industry. In his presentation, Vivek will cover real-world case studies detailing how these attacks have resulted in millions of dollars in damages and what organizations can do to strengthen their defenses against these emerging threats.

Biography:

Vivek Ramachandran is a security researcher, book author, speaker-trainer, and serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in offensive cybersecurity. He is currently the founder of SquareX, building a browser-native security product focused on detecting, mitigating, and threat-hunting web attacks against enterprise users and consumers. Prior to that, he was the founder of Pentester Academy (acquired in 2021), which has trained thousands of customers from government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and enterprises from over 140+ countries. Before that, Vivek's company built an 802.11ac monitoring product sold exclusively to defense agencies.

Vivek discovered the Caffe Latte attack, broke WEP Cloaking, conceptualized enterprise Wi-Fi Backdoors, and created Chellam (Wi-Fi Firewall), WiMonitor Enterprise (802.11ac monitoring), Chigula (Wi-Fi traffic analysis via SQL), Deceptacon (IoT Honeypots), among others. He is the author of multiple five-star-rated books in offensive cybersecurity, which have sold thousands of copies worldwide and have been translated into multiple languages.

He has been a speaker/trainer at top security conferences such as Blackhat USA, Europe and Abu Dhabi, DEFCON, Nullcon, Brucon, HITB, Hacktivity, and others. Vivek's work in cybersecurity has been covered in Forbes, TechCrunch, and other popular media outlets.

In a past life, he was one of the programmers of the 802.1x protocol and Port Security in Cisco's 6500 Catalyst series of switches. He was also one of the winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among a reported 65,000 participants. He has also published multiple research papers in the field of DDoS, ARP Spoofing Detection, and Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection Systems. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary title of Regional Director of Cybersecurity by Microsoft for a period of three years, and in 2024 he joined the BlackHat Arsenal Review Board.

About SquareX:
SquareX's industry-first Browser Detection and Response (BDR) helps organizations detect, mitigate and threat-hunt client-side web attacks targeting employees in real time. This includes defending against identity attacks, malicious extensions, spearphishing, browser data loss and insider threats.

SquareX takes a research and attack-focused approach to browser security. SquareX's dedicated research team was the first to discover and disclose multiple pivotal attacks, including Last Mile Reassembly Attacks, Polymorphic Extensions and Browser Syncjacking. As part of the Year of Browser Bugs (YOBB) project, SquareX commits to continue disclosing at least one major architectural browser vulnerability every month. 

To learn more about SquareX's BDR, contact us at [email protected]. 

For press enquiries on this disclosure on the Year of Browser Bugs, email us at [email protected]. 

SOURCE SquareX