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.