Best Talks at NorthSec 2025
Hand-picked from in-depth reviewer verdicts. View all talks at NorthSec 2025 →
- 1. Weaponizing XSS: Cyberespionage tactics in webmail exploitation — Matthieu Faou
ESET Senior Malware Researcher Matthieu Faou presented two years of research into XSS exploitation in on-premises webmail applications — Roundcube, MDaemon, Zimbra, and Horde. The research identified two zero-day vulnerabilities…
- 2. A Pirate's Guide to Snake Oil and Security — HD Moore
HD Moore, creator of Metasploit and now principal at runZero, dissects the vulnerability management industry with two decades of hard-won credibility. He demonstrates that most commercial vuln scanners cover fewer than half of known…
- 3. A Tabletop As Big As the World — Wendy Nather
Wendy Nather, one of the most experienced incident response practitioners in the field, uses the NorthSec 2025 closing keynote to argue that tabletop exercises are systematically underdesigned — too narrow in scope, too polite in scenario…
- 4. Living Off the Pipeline: From Supply Chain 0-Days to Predicting the next XZ-like attacks — François Proulx
François Proulx, VP of Security Research at Montreal-based BoostSecurity, presents a systematic taxonomy of CI/CD attack vectors, a live walk-through of vulnerable GitHub Actions workflow patterns, and the architecture of two internal…
- 5. Nice to meet you! That will be 20 million please — David Décary-Hétu
David Décary-Hétu, criminologist at the University of Montreal, presents the first large-scale qualitative analysis of ransomware negotiation transcripts: 195 conversations comprising roughly 6,300 messages exchanged between 23 ransomware…
- 6. One certificate to rule them all: the story of a Chinese-nexus botnet — Amaury-Jacques Garçon
Sequoia CTI analyst Amaury-Jacques Garçon presented a two-year investigation into a Chinese-nexus Operational Relay Box (ORB) network that grew to approximately 70,000 compromised devices. The investigation began from a single shared…
- 7. Stolen Laptops - A brief overview of modern physical access attacks — Pierre-Nicolas Allard-Coutu
Pierre-Nicolas Allard-Coutu, senior penetration tester at Bell Canada's STIRT team, delivers a fast-paced, technically detailed breakdown of how modern laptops are compromised in physical access ("stolen laptop") scenarios. Encryption at…
- 8. Exploring Azure Logic Apps and Turning Misconfigurations into Attack Opportunities — Chirag Savla, Raunak Parmar
Chirag Savla and Raunak Parmar of White Knight Labs methodically map the attack surface of Azure Logic Apps — Microsoft's low-code workflow automation service — demonstrating how Logic App Contributor permissions, exposed webhook URLs…
- 9. Enhancing Identity Credential Privacy with Zero-Knowledge Proofs — Christian Paquin
Mobile driver's licenses and digital identity credentials are rolling out across North America, but existing standards like SD-JWT and mDL still leave a critical gap: every credential presentation leaks a unique digital fingerprint that…