Hackers collaborate.
They share tools, trade access, reuse techniques, and hand off footholds between teams. Collaboration is baked into how modern attackers operate.
Defenders, on the other hand, often don’t collaborate by default.
Instead, we’re divided by organizational boundaries: software vs. security, red team vs. blue team, product vs. enterprise. Social pressures creep in. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of being blamed. Even fear of helping the “other team” succeed.
In this keynote, Farzan Karimi draws on nearly two decades of experience leading offensive and defensive security teams at organizations including Google, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Moderna to explore what happens after the exploit, when human behavior matters more than technical skill.
From red team operations that triggered internal friction, to incidents that escalated into arrests through cross-functional trust, this talk explores why the most dangerous zero-day in modern enterprises is not always found in code.
It’s isolation between people.
This talk isn’t about tools or tactics. It’s about ego, incentives, fear, and what changes when security teams choose collaboration over blame.
