I had a blast at my first Black Hat! With more than 20,000 attendees, 400 booths, and an unfathomable amount of afterparties, Black Hat 2026 taught me that sleep is a choice, and that what happens at Black Hat, definitely doesn’t stay there.
House of SOC
My week in Vegas opened at the House of SOC, where Fig Security and Cribl hosted an evening of dinner and drinks at Kumi, plus custom-engraved Ray-Bans. I still can’t stop wearing mine.
There was something fitting about the gift. Cribl spends its days helping security teams filter the noise out of an overwhelming stream of data, routing only what matters to where it needs to go. Fig Security, founded by veterans of Siemplify and Cymulate, is chasing a quieter but equally important problem: the way detection tools slowly drift out of alignment as environments change, until a team discovers a gap only after it’s too late. Between the two of them, it was a fitting first night, an industry obsessed with clarity, kicking things off by handing out clearer vision, literally.
Seemplicity’s Women in Cyber Workout
The next morning, Seemplicity and Cyera hosted a Women in Cyber workout at Envy Training. Forty-five minutes of the most intense HIIT workout later, with legs shaking and endorphins doing most of the talking, we refueled over breakfast and charcuterie boards that were almost too pretty to eat.
Seemplicity exists to strip the wasted motion out of vulnerability remediation, turning a slow, manual scramble into a clear, automated path from detection to fix. Cyera does something similar for data itself, discovering and classifying sensitive information across an organization so security teams know exactly what they’re protecting and where it lives. Two companies built around eliminating wasted effort, and there we were, sweating through the most efficient way to build a room full of allies before 8 a.m.
The Grand Prix
Tuesday night, Zluri swept a group of us out to the Las Vegas Grand Prix for a lap around an actual F1 go-kart track. I finished second… to last.
Zluri spends its time on something a little less adrenaline-fueled: giving IT and security teams visibility into who has access to what across a sprawling stack of SaaS apps, and automating the reviews that usually get lost in the shuffle.
We also enjoyed a delicious dinner and drinks and met some awesome people!
Inside the Needle Stack
Wednesday afternoon, I got a rare look behind the curtain: a tour of Black Hat’s own Network Operations Center, led by Bart Stump and Neil “Grifter” Wyler. Two things stuck with me. First, you cannot buy your way into the NOC. Every company represented there is a partner, not a sponsor, a distinction the team is clearly proud of. Second, the scale of it: while a typical SOC is hunting for a needle in a haystack, Black Hat’s NOC spends the week finding a needle in a needle stack. Their systems flagged more than 9 million potential threats over the course of the show. Only 308 of those actually needed blocking.
Thank you to Coalfire, whose risk and compliance work sits behind so much of what makes that kind of vigilance possible, for hosting the tour and lunch at Kumi.
Trust Is Still the First Exploit
I caught the tail end of a talk hosted by Illumio, featuring Brett Johnson, once one of the most wanted cybercriminals in the country, now on the other side of the fence entirely. Listening to him unpack how AI is reshaping the tools attackers use, one line stayed with me: no matter how far the technology has come since his own days breaking into systems, trust is still the first thing an attacker exploits. It was a reminder that behind every new tool, the oldest vulnerability is still just being human. Illumio’s own work, keeping a breach in one corner of a network from spreading everywhere else, felt like a fitting rebuttal to that same idea: assume trust will break, and build for it anyway.
House of Glow
Wandering through the venue, I stumbled onto Glow’s “House of Glow” pop-up at the House of Blues and grabbed some fresh coconut water on my way past. Glow just emerged from stealth as one of the buzziest new names on the floor, a unicorn out of the gate, betting that endpoint security needs a full rebuild for a world where both employees and autonomous AI agents are now operating on the same devices. A small, refreshing pause in the middle of a very fast week.
The High Roller
Wednesday ended the way few work days do: 550 feet above the Strip, in a High Roller cabin hosted by Eclypsium, with dinner and a skyline. Eclypsium spends its time worrying about a part of the stack most people never think to check, the firmware and infrastructure code running underneath everything else. From up there, watching the whole city light up at once, it was hard not to think about how much invisible infrastructure the view was quietly depending on.
InnovateHERS
My last morning began with the event that ended up meaning the most: InnovateHERS, hosted by Elastic and WiCyS. Sharing that I’m a Women in Cyber Scholarship recipient in that room didn’t feel like a formality. It felt celebrated. I talked with women who’ve spent years shaping this industry and talked about wanting to see more of us at Black Hat every year. The goodie bag Elastic sent us home with was thoughtfully curated for the summer as well!
Locks, Drones, and One Last Robot Fight
As the show wound down, I made my way to the Drone Zone to try my hand at hacking one, picked a few locks just to see if I could, and built a tiny Lego lock-and-key that I’m unreasonably proud of. I even caught the final seconds of a robot battle on my way out. It was the perfect, slightly chaotic closing note for a week that had already been so much of everything.
A Final Note
I ended the trip the way I started it, surrounded by people who make this industry feel like a community rather than a competition, watching the Bellagio fountains with the rest of the CDM team.
A huge shoutout to the CDM team for sponsoring me. It is such a privilege to speak with some of the industry’s top innovators and leaders, and to make meaningful connections at one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences.
As I prepare to roll out Cyber Defense Magazine’s Industry Highlights from this year, I want to share the note I ended every conversation on. For each interview during the conference, I closed with the same question: “If a CISO were to read one sentence from this interview, what should it be?”
The answers I got were, surprisingly, unique to every single company. But one theme echoed across nearly all of them: this is an exciting time, because AI brings so much positive possibility, not just risk and threat.
With that, my first Black Hat is officially in the books, and I’m already counting down to the next one!
About the Author
Arya Baviskar is a Women in Cyber scholarship winner and Reporter at Cyber Defense Magazine. She is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University studying cybersecurity. As she approaches her second year in university, she is training in Cyber Threat Intelligence as an intern at the Cyber Security Forum Initiative. Additionally, she is an AI Trainer at Handshake AI, evaluating LLMs for bias and safety. What ties her experiences together is a consistent focus on making complex technology more transparent and accessible to the people that it affects. Arya can be reached online at [email protected] or through her LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/aryabaviskar.
