Exhibitor booths are a major part of the Black Hat experience, giving companies a chance to bring their technology to life and make a lasting impression. This year, some took that creativity to a whole another level!
As someone who likes to experience the world through music, their creativity sparked a little of my own. I couldn’t resist giving my favorites a soundtrack to match their atmosphere.
Now turn up the volume! We’re pressing rewind on some of Black Hat’s most creative booths and going behind the spectacle to learn more about the cybersecurity companies that brought them to life.
Vega
- Theme: Vega Desert
- Song: “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches & Herb
Vega brought a burst of 1970s energy to Black Hat with bright yellow colors, a live DJ, and dancers grooving around! It felt like a desert disco had landed in the middle of the expo floor, making “Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches & Herb the perfect song for the moment.
The experience introduced attendees to a decidedly futuristic company. Vega is an Agentic Cyber Defense company built around its Security Analytics Mesh, or SAM. The platform performs detection, triage, and investigation directly where an organization’s data already lives, eliminating the need to move everything into a centralized system for analysis.
Vega calls this the “Post-SIEM Era,” a shift away from traditional security models that require organizations to centralize massive amounts of data before they can analyze it. Instead, SAM brings the analytics to the data, helping security teams investigate threats across their existing environment at AI speed.
Inside Vega’s Black Hat Vision
When asked what inspired Vega’s Black Hat presence, Tyler Golden, Director of Field Marketing at Vega, shared:
“When a company comes to an event as significant as Black Hat, the biggest challenge is making a real impact amid all the noise. For us at Vega, it was the perfect opportunity to showcase who we truly are. We chose to establish a strong presence from the moment attendees arrived, creating one of the largest and most prominent booths at the entrance to the conference. The space seamlessly combined deep technological expertise, a bold and distinctive brand identity, and an immersive experience. We wanted everyone who walked through the doors to immediately feel the power of Vega, and I’m proud to say that’s exactly what we achieved.”
If this is what the future of cyber defense looks like, the Post-SIEM Era may be worth dancing about!
Black Kite
- Theme: Collective Resilience in the Forest
- Song: “Bloom” by The Paper Kites
Walking up to Black Kite’s booth felt like stepping away from the noise of Black Hat and into a quiet forest. The calm atmosphere immediately reminded me of the delicate guitar strumming at the beginning of “Bloom” by The Paper Kites. Even the song’s forest-filled music video felt as though it belonged in the space.
The peaceful setting carried an important cybersecurity message. Black Kite helps organizations understand the cyber risks that can enter through the vendors and suppliers they depend on. Its AI-native platform continuously analyzes external risk signals to identify potential trouble across these interconnected ecosystems.
Rather than viewing each company as an isolated defender, Black Kite uses shared intelligence to help organizations spot risks earlier and understand how threats could spread across their third-party relationships. It is an approach that fits naturally with the company’s vision of collective resilience.
The Network Beneath the Forest
Black Kite explained how the natural world inspired its Black Hat theme:
“Our Black Hat theme is all about collective resilience. Trees don’t defend the forest alone. They share resources, send warning signals, and strengthen the entire ecosystem through a connected underground network.
Black Kite works the same way. As more organizations use Black Kite’s intelligence to identify risk earlier and work with vendors to improve security, everyone benefits from stronger intelligence and a more resilient ecosystem.”
At Black Kite, resilience was not something built alone. It was something allowed to bloom together.
Saviynt
- Theme: Ride the AI Wave
- Song: “Cool Down” by Kolohe Kai
Walking up to Saviynt’s booth felt like stumbling upon a beachside retreat, complete with a surf shack and glowing fire pit. The laid-back escape immediately brought “Cool Down” by Hawaiian reggae band Kolohe Kai to mind. Its breezy, ocean-inspired sound made it the perfect match for Saviynt’s “Ride the AI Wave” theme.
Behind the beachy setting was a timely message about navigating the rising tide of enterprise AI. Saviynt focuses on identity security, including the growing challenge of securing AI agents that can access data and take action across business systems.
Through Zuma, its AI security platform, organizations can discover AI agents across their environments, establish who owns them, and control what they are allowed to access. Zuma can also evaluate an agent’s actions at runtime, helping stop unauthorized behavior before it reaches sensitive resources.
The Meaning Behind the AI Wave
Saviynt explained how Zuma Beach inspired its Black Hat theme:
“‘Ride the AI Wave,’ Saviynt’s Black Hat theme, captured how Saviynt helps organizations navigate the rapid rise of enterprise AI with Zuma, our new AI Identity Security platform. The theme draws inspiration from its namesake, Zuma Beach in Los Angeles, where the open shoreline offers an unobstructed view to the horizon. That sense of visibility reflects what organizations need as AI adoption accelerates, often beneath the surface. Saviynt helps them discover AI agents across their environments, govern what those agents can access and do, and establish clear ownership, so they can embrace AI securely and with confidence.”
For a moment, Saviynt made the Vegas desert feel like the perfect place to cool down and ride the next wave.
Noma
Theme: Keeping the Gnomes Under Control
Song: “Fiesta Pagana” by Mägo de Oz
Walking into Noma’s booth felt like stumbling into a gnome party that had gotten wonderfully out of hand. Between mischievous gnomes and a game of Whack-a-Gnome, the playful chaos immediately brought “Fiesta Pagana” by Spanish folk-metal band Mägo de Oz to mind. Its wild medieval energy made it the perfect anthem for Noma’s gnome takeover.
The fun concept represented a serious challenge emerging inside modern businesses. Noma helps enterprises discover and secure AI agents wherever they operate, from custom applications and SaaS platforms to coding assistants and MCP servers.
Its platform combines AI security posture management with access control, adversarial testing, and runtime detection and response. Together, these capabilities help organizations identify risks and maintain control throughout an AI agent’s lifecycle.
Why Noma Let the Gnomes Loose
Noma explained how its mischievous characters represent both the promise and unpredictability of autonomous AI:
“Our Black Hat theme is all about the balance of autonomy and control. Gnomes represent AI agents and have changed everything. They’re autonomous and non-deterministic, capable of completing complex tasks and enlisting other gnomes’ help, all while you sleep. But that same independence makes them risky: they’re easy to trick, easily distracted, and can lose control in relentless pursuit of a goal.
As organizations deploy more autonomous agents across their business, they need a way to securely deploy them to any task while knowing they’re under control. This is how Noma works to securely allow organizations to deploy agents.”
The gnomes may have caused a little chaos, but Noma showed how to keep AI agents from becoming part of it.
Torq
- Theme: The AI SOC Apocalypse
- Song: “Shepherd of Fire” by Avenged Sevenfold
Torq has never been subtle, and that is exactly why I love it. Blue flames and a towering skeleton transformed its booth into an apocalyptic world straight out of a heavy metal video. The dark spectacle immediately brought “Shepherd of Fire” by Avenged Sevenfold to mind, with its ominous opening and commanding sound making it the perfect anthem for Torq’s AI SOC Apocalypse.
That bold personality extends to the technology behind the brand. Torq’s AI SOC Platform combines agentic security operations with hyperautomation to help security teams investigate and respond to threats at machine speed.
At the center are Torq Socrates and the Torq SOC Brain, which work with specialized AI agents to autonomously investigate alerts and take action against threats. The goal is to reduce the burden on analysts while helping security teams respond faster and build more advanced workflows.
Inside the AI SOC Apocalypse
Torq explained how its apocalyptic world represented the growing pressure facing security operations teams:
“Torq’s Black Hat booth was inspired by the stark reality of the ‘AI SOC apocalypse,’ a crisis driven by relentless threat volumes, alert fatigue, and overwhelming analyst burnout. To visualize this crisis, Torq anchored its presence with Skelly, a towering inflatable skeleton that served as the physical embodiment of machine-speed threats security teams are forced to outrun.
Wrapped in a cohesive, comic-book-inspired aesthetic featuring hand-drawn flame accents, halftone lettering, and a sky blue and black palette, every element of the booth, from the interactive demo stations to comic-style collateral like ‘The AI SOC Apocalypse,’ was engineered to reinforce Torq’s core manifesto.
By contrasting the grim apocalypse of passive, detection-only security tools with the proactive power of agentic automation, Torq turned a complex technical distinction into a high-impact message. ‘If it can’t take action, it’s not an AI SOC.’”
Torq brought the fire to Black Hat and proved once again that cybersecurity can be every bit as metal as the threats it faces.
The Next Track Is Coming
These booths gave complex technology a personality people could remember long after leaving the expo floor.
Experience them for yourself in the full video on our LinkedIn @cyberdefensemagazine or new Instagram channel, @cyberdefensecafe.
The creativity does not end here. Part two is coming soon with more unforgettable booths and songs to match!
About the Author
Angie Apolinar is a Lead Reporter at Cyber Defense Magazine and a Women in Cybersecurity award recipient. She is a graduate student in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance at Western Governors University with a degree in Psychology from California State University, Fullerton. Angie serves as a Cyber Mentor, helping prepare the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. She has also worked on multiple NASA research and workforce development programs, including L’SPACE, where she contributed to mission concepts, systems engineering, software design, and AI-driven aerospace research.
Reach her online at [email protected].
