Farzan Karimi is a seasoned cybersecurity leader and Deputy CISO, Executive Director at Moderna, where he leads incident response, security engineering, and offensive security. Over 20 years in offensive security, he has built and led offensive security programs at Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Moderna. At Google, he managed the Android Red Team, targeting low-level components across the Android ecosystem. His earlier work exploiting PlayStation and Xbox devkits helped shape security features for next-generation gaming platforms.
Farzan is a four-time Black Hat and DEF CON speaker. Most recently, he presented at DEF CON 2025 on Recursive Request Exploits (RRE), a new web hacking technique that drew broad industry attention and was nominated as one of PortSwigger's Top Web Hacking Techniques of 2025. His recent QR Jacking research exposed how abandoned branded QR domains can be hijacked, and his work has been featured in WIRED.
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