🎩 Black Hat USA 2026 — Las Vegas

The premier technical cybersecurity conference in the world. Six days of hands-on Trainings, an executive Summit Day, and the main conference featuring cutting-edge research Briefings, the Arsenal demo area, and the industry's densest Business Hall.

📅 August 1–6, 2026 📍 Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, USA 👥 ~20,000 attendees 🔬 100+ peer-reviewed research talks

📌 What Is Black Hat USA?

Founded in 1997, Black Hat has grown into the most rigorous and technically demanding security conference on the planet. Every presentation is peer-reviewed by a volunteer board of industry experts — which is why Black Hat Briefings remain the venue where the world's most important vulnerabilities, attack techniques, and defensive breakthroughs are disclosed first. In 2026, the event returns to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for its six-day program.

Cybersecurity concept — six-day program structure — Fig. 1 — Synoptic schema: the six-day Black Hat USA 2026 program at a glance.

Black Hat USA keynote stage in Las Vegas

The Black Hat keynote stage — where the industry's biggest announcements land.

🛠️ Days 1–4 · Black Hat Trainings (August 1–4)

Aug 1–4 2-day & 4-day courses Hands-on labs

Black Hat Trainings are intensive, lab-driven courses taught by world-class instructors. Unlike conference talks, these are designed to build real, repeatable skills you take back to your job on Monday morning.

Exploit development: Windows & Linux privilege escalation, browser and kernel exploitation.
Malware analysis & reverse engineering: from static triage to full reverse engineering of modern loaders.
Cloud security: AWS/Azure/GCP attack & defense, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipeline security.
AI security: attacking and defending LLM-based systems, red-teaming generative AI.
Hardware & embedded: firmware extraction, hardware implants, and IoT exploitation.
Defense: detection engineering, threat hunting, and purple-team tradecraft.

💡 Pro tip: Trainings sell out months in advance — register early, and pair a 2-day course with the Briefings pass for the classic Black Hat experience.

🎯 Summit Day (August 4)

Aug 4 Executive audience CISO-level content

The Black Hat Summit is a focused, executive-oriented day that bridges pure research and business strategy. It brings CISOs, senior government officials, and researchers into the same room to discuss emerging threats, regulatory pressure, and how to translate technical risk into board-level decisions.

Closed-door briefings on nation-state activity and critical-infrastructure threats.
Panels on AI governance, supply-chain risk, and incident disclosure policy.
Networking format designed for peer exchange among security leaders.

🔬 Briefings (August 5–6)

Aug 5–6 100+ research talks Peer-reviewed Main conference

The heart of Black Hat. Briefings are the talks the entire industry waits for — new zero-days, novel attack classes, and research that frequently reshapes how defenders think. Each submission is reviewed by the Black Hat Review Board, keeping the technical bar exceptionally high.

New attack research: from protocol-level flaws to full exploit chains against modern platforms.
AI & machine learning security: prompt injection, model theft, agentic-AI abuse, and AI-assisted attacks.
Cloud & identity: cross-tenant attacks, OAuth abuse, and SaaS kill chains.
Hardware & firmware: chip-level and supply-chain research.
Defense & detection: what blue teams should build after seeing the offensive research.

⚡ 2026 theme: Expect AI security to dominate the agenda — including research into autonomous AI systems capable of discovering and chaining novel attacks against real-world targets.

Black Hat 2026 briefing session on autonomous AI attacks — A packed Briefings session at Black Hat — the "HTTP/1.1 Must Die!" talk drew a full room.

🧰 Arsenal — Live Tool Demos (Business Hall)

Aug 3–6 Open-source tools Live demonstrations

Arsenal is Black Hat's demo theater inside the Business Hall: open-source developers and researchers demonstrate their tools live, without slides — you watch exploits, scanners, and frameworks run in real time and ask questions directly to the authors.

Live demos of exploitation frameworks, reconnaissance platforms, and defensive tooling.
Direct access to tool authors — the fastest way to evaluate a tool before adopting it.
Strictly no sales pitches: Arsenal is reserved for free and open-source projects.

Black Hat Arsenal demo pods in the Business Hall

Crowd gathered at an Arsenal demo station

🧭 Research Tracks Synoptic Matrix

The Briefings program is organized into thematic tracks. This synoptic matrix summarizes the main tracks and the kind of research you can expect in each.

Synoptic matrix of Black Hat USA 2026 research tracks — Fig. 2 — Synoptic matrix: Black Hat USA 2026 research tracks and typical content.

🗺️ Practical Information

Item	Details
Venue	Mandalay Bay Convention Center, 3950 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV
Dates	August 1–6, 2026 (Trainings Aug 1–4 · Summit Aug 4 · Briefings Aug 5–6)
Passes	Trainings (per course) · Briefings · Business Hall · Combo passes
Typical pricing*	Briefings: ~$2,895 · Business Hall: ~$199 · Trainings: ~$2,500–$4,500 per course
Who attends	Security researchers, engineers, CISOs, government agencies, vendors, press
Hacker Week context	BSides Las Vegas (Aug 3–5) runs in parallel; DEF CON 34 starts Aug 6 at the LVCC

*Based on recent-year published pricing; 2026 rates to be confirmed on the official website. Early-bird discounts typically save several hundred dollars.

🎰 Hacker Week strategy: Many attendees combine Black Hat Briefings with BSidesLV earlier in the week and stay for DEF CON 34 (Aug 6–9) — giving you ten straight days of the world's best security content in one city.