Harshita Varma
With a background that bridges technical engineering and product strategy, Harshita has a unique perspective on scaling complex systems while maintaining a high bar for quality and security. She was awarded the Dan Kohn Scholarship to attend KubeCon EU 2023 and recently co-presented the session "From Noise to Clarity: Humanizing Observability" at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta.
Harshita is an active international speaker, with upcoming engagements at ContainerDays London 2026. Traveling from India, she is passionate about fostering a "Security-First" culture within DevOps teams and advocating for more inclusive, sustainable open-source communities.
Session
This session moves beyond initial cluster access to explore a highly stealthy persistence vector: the weaponization of Mutating Admission Controllers. While typically used for security policy enforcement, these controllers can be subverted to inject malicious sidecars or modify pod specs in real-time without altering original deployment manifests. We will demonstrate how an attacker can maintain a "ghost" presence that survives standard audits, image updates, and pod restarts, effectively turning the Kubernetes control plane against itself.