DEF CON 34 — Las Vegas 2026

There's a reason people call the week of Black Hat and DEF CON "Hacker Summer Camp." While Black Hat runs on polished briefings and corporate badges, DEF CON runs on cash at the door, pseudonyms, and the philosophy that technology should be poked, prodded, and understood.

The Villages

DEF CON's 30+ villages are its beating heart. Each one is a self-contained community focused on a specific domain:

• AI Village — attacking and defending machine learning systems
• ICS Village — hacking industrial control systems (SCADA, PLCs)
• Car Hacking Village — automotive security research
• Aerospace Village — satellite and aviation security
• Lock Picking Village — exactly what it sounds like
• Social Engineering Village — live vishing competitions

The CTF

The DEF CON Capture the Flag is the Super Bowl of competitive hacking. Teams from around the world qualify through online preliminaries, then compete in a grueling 48-hour finals that test binary exploitation, reverse engineering, cryptography, and network offense/defense.

The Culture

DEF CON is vendor-neutral, anti-corporate, and radically inclusive. You'll see teenagers next to intelligence agency researchers. Badges are electronic hardware puzzles. Parties are legendary. And despite the chaos, the security insights that emerge from DEF CON regularly make international news.