M.S. in Computer Science, Georgia Tech.
B.S. in Software Engineering, Drexel University
Ax Sharma is a Security Researcher, Threat Intel Analyst, and Tech Reporter who holds a passion for perpetual learning. In his spare time, he loves exploiting vulnerabilities, ethically, and educating a wide range of audiences via blogging and vlogging. He’s an active community member of the OWASP Foundation and the British Association of Journalists (BAJ).
Ax’s expertise lies in malware analysis, vulnerability research, threat intelligence analysis, and web app security. Through responsible disclosure, he has previously exposed serious bugs and security vulnerabilities affecting national & global organisations like HM Government, Yodel, U.S. DHS, P.F. Chang’s, Planet Fitness, Comcast/Arris, Ellucian, and the popular restaurant chain, Buca di Beppo.
In early 2018, Ax helped prevent a data breach at Georgia Tech by going public with a serious flaw that was left unpatched for over a year.
To consult Ax for your next big security project or for media source requests, drop him a note here.
Ax’s hobbies include working out, reading, playing piano and developing innovative, upcoming web projects.
- Where did these mysterious PrismJS npm versions come from?
In 2015, strange 9000.0.x versions of PrismJS appeared on npm downloads, and nobody had a clue where they came from, or what purpose they served. Roughly four years later, PrismJS 9000.0.1 and 9000.0.2 were removed from npm for the reasons described below. But to date, no one seems to know anything more about this incident. PrismJS is a… Read more » - NodeJS malware caught exfiltrating IPs, username, and device information on GitHub
Multiple NodeJS packages laden with malicious code have been spotted on npm registry. These “typosquatting” packages served no purpose other than collecting data from the user’s device and broadcasting it on public GitHub pages. The findings were spotted by Sonatype’s automated malware detection systems and further investigated by the company’s Security Research… Read more » - Can a Windows wallpaper really hijack your Microsoft account password?
This month security researcher bohops demonstrated a credential harvesting trick that uses Windows theme files. Setting a Windows wallpaper location to a file present at a remote location, for example, a password-protected HTTP(s) page, instead of a locally present image, can be abused for phishing. This happens because the password-protected… Read more »