Editor's Picks

Best Talks at Black Hat USA 2025

Hand-picked from in-depth reviewer verdicts — the top 12 talks from this conference. Skip the noise, find the signal.

← All talks at Black Hat USA 2025

  1. 1

    Burning, Trashing, Spacecraft Crashing: A Collection of Vulnerabilities That Will End Your Space Mission

    Researchers from Vision Space demonstrated live exploits against three open-source mission control systems and NASA's Core Flight System, proving that software vulnerabilities — not kinetic weapons — are now the most accessible path to destroying a satellite mission. Critical…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  2. 2

    Windows Hell No for Business

    Researchers contracted by Germany's Federal Office for IT Security (BSI) conducted an in-depth security analysis of Windows Hello for Business and demonstrated that a local administrator can decrypt the biometric template database, read facial recognition data for all enrolled…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  3. 3

    I'm in Your Logs Now, Deceiving Your Analysts and Blinding Your EDR

    Olaf Hartong of Falcon Force demonstrated that the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) subsystem — which Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike, and other major EDRs rely on for telemetry — can be abused by low-privileged attackers to inject fake events, trigger false alerts…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  4. 4

    China's 5+ Year Campaign to Penetrate Perimeter Network Defenses

    Over five years, Chinese state-linked threat actors mounted a sustained, evolving campaign against Sophos XG firewalls — and by extension, every major network perimeter device. Sophos responded by deploying its own covert kernel implant on attacker-controlled firewalls to…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  5. 5

    Invoking Gemini for Workspace Agents with a Simple Google Calendar Invite

    Researchers from SafeBreach and the Technion demonstrated 14 distinct attacks against Google's Gemini AI assistant using nothing but a malicious Google Calendar invitation. By embedding indirect prompt injections in calendar event titles, the researchers caused Gemini to spam…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  6. 6

    Wormable Zero-Click RCE in AirPlay Impacts Billions of Apple and IoT Devices

    "Airborne" is a collection of 23 vulnerabilities — 17 assigned CVEs — in Apple's AirPlay protocol and the AirPlay SDK used by third-party IoT device manufacturers. The research produced the first-ever zero-click, wormable remote code execution on macOS, alongside…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  7. 7

    Breaking Out of The AI Cage: Pwning AI Providers with NVIDIA Vulnerabilities

    Wiz Research discovered a critical TOCTOU (time-of-check time-of-use) vulnerability in NVIDIA Container Toolkit that allows a malicious container image to mount the host filesystem — effectively breaking out of container isolation. The flaw, now patched as CVE-2024-0132…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  8. 8

    AI Enterprise Compromise: 0-Click Exploit Methods

    Zenity CTO Michael Bargury and co-presenter Tamir demonstrate zero-click prompt injection attacks against enterprise AI agents across Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce (Einstein), Cursor with Jira MCP, and ChatGPT — showing that in every case, an attacker who can…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  9. 9

    Advanced Active Directory to Entra ID Lateral Movement Techniques

    Dirk-Jan Mollema of Outsider Security demonstrated that Exchange Hybrid deployments create a hidden, high-privilege attack path from on-premises Active Directory to full Microsoft 365 tenant compromise. By extracting exportable certificates from an on-premises Exchange server…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  10. 10

    2 Cops 2 Broadcasting: TETRA End-To-End Under Scrutiny

    Midnight Blue — the team behind the landmark TETRA:BURST disclosures in 2023 — returned to Black Hat with a follow-up that dismantles the mitigations deployed in response to their original research. They demonstrate that TETRA end-to-end encryption, the "expensive solution"…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  11. 11

    Unveiling the Hidden Perils of the TorchScript Engine in PyTorch

    PyTorch's `weights_only=True` parameter — the standard fix for `pickle`-based RCE in ML model loading — does not actually prevent code execution when loading TorchScript (`.pt`) files, because the TorchScript engine processes a separate code path with over 2,000 built-in…

    0 Dr. Zero MUST SEE ★★★★★ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★
  12. 12

    Uncovering and Responding to the tj-actions Supply Chain Breach

    On March 14, 2025, Step Security's automated detection system identified that the widely-used `tj-actions/changed-files` GitHub Action had been compromised via a chained supply chain attack originating from a pull request vulnerability in an unrelated repository. The malicious…

    0 Dr. Zero STRONG ACCEPT ★★★★☆ H Heather Calloway MUST SEE ★★★★★