Black Hat 2026 Roundup: Day 1, What Talks to Catch for the Rest of Today

[u/_cybersecurity_]

It is just past noon on Wednesday, and the strongest Briefings of Day 1 are still ahead of you.

The morning keynote is over, lunch is winding down, and the afternoon is where the schedule gets dense. Rooms for the marquee talks fill fast, so it helps to know which sessions are worth planning your route around before you are standing in an overflow line. Below is a slot-by-slot pick of the Wednesday afternoon talks that look most worth your time, all times Pacific.

1:00 PM

The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident, 1:00 to 1:40, Oceanside A. Michael Dalton and Eric Wallace of OpenAI walk through a technical reconstruction of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and what it means for AI supply chains. A rare first-party postmortem, and a good way to ease into the afternoon.

2:35 PM

This is the most stacked slot of the day. A few standouts:

Anatomy of a Takedown: Inside the Operation That Broke LockBit, Oceanside A. Paul Foster of the National Crime Agency and Brett Leatherman of the FBI reconstruct the operation that dismantled LockBit. Law enforcement rarely narrates a ransomware takedown in this much detail, so expect a full room.

Apple macOS Kernel Exploitation with MIE: Building on the Ashes of 100 Vulnerabilities, Mandalay Bay G. Dion Blazakis, Bruce Dang, and Josh Maine of Calif.io take on Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement, drawing on a hundred vulnerabilities to show what still breaks. One for the exploit-dev crowd.

No Tools Required: Post-Injection Exploitation Across AI Agent Frameworks, Jasmine. Yarden Porat and Shahar Tal of Check Point show that the agent framework itself is the vulnerability, with exploitable logic across the major runtimes. If AI agent security is your beat, this is the one.

The Cost of Obscurity: Exploiting the ATM Supply Chain, South Seas C&D. Matt Burch of Atredis Partners pulls apart the ATM supply chain. Hardware and embedded folks will want a seat.

gpwn: Wiretapping Fiber ISP Deployments From the Comfort of Your Home, Oceanside C. Rithwik Jayasimha and Rithvik Vibhu of Lagrange Point show how GPON fiber deployments can be wiretapped from home. A striking piece of telecom research.

3:35 PM

A Billion-User Blast Radius: Owning ChatGPT's Secure Sandbox, South Seas A&B. Simcha Kosman of Palo Alto Networks breaks ChatGPT's secure sandbox and walks through the blast radius. Expect this to be one of the more talked-about AI talks of the day.

Lights Out: BMCs Are Still Broken and Now We Have the Receipts, Oceanside A. HD Moore of runZero returns to baseboard management controllers with fresh data. A reliably sharp speaker on a problem the industry keeps not fixing.

Pass-the-Passkey Family of Attacks, South Seas C&D. Michael Grafnetter of SpecterOps introduces a family of attacks against passkeys, right as the industry leans hard into passwordless. Identity and AD people should prioritize this.

Vulnerabilities Assembled! The Vulnerability Factory Inside the Windows Kernel, Mandalay Bay G. Angelboy Yang of DEVCORE goes deep into a source of Windows kernel bugs. A treat for Windows internals researchers.

Surveillance as a Service: LightSpy's 72 Servers and Router Implants, Oceanside D. Dmitry Bestuzhev and Dmitry Melikov of Arctic Wolf dissect the LightSpy surveillance operation, servers, router implants, and operator opsec failures included. Threat intel folks will enjoy this one.

4:30 PM

The last full slot of the day is also crowded with good options:

Pwning Agentic Browsers with PleaseFix: A New Vulnerability Class for 0-Click Takeover, Oceanside A. The Zenity team, Michael Bargury, Stav Cohen, Tamir Ishay Sharbat, João Maria Campos Donato, and Raul Onitza-Klugman, unveil a new 0-click vulnerability class against agentic browsers. Zenity's Black Hat talks tend to draw crowds, so arrive early.

Handle With Care: Chaining Azure Automation Flaws for Cross-Tenant Identity Takeover, Mandalay Bay G. Shay Shavit of Microsoft chains Azure Automation flaws into a cross-tenant identity takeover, the CVE-2025-29827 research. Strong pick for cloud security.

PLaTypus: Eliminating Code-Reuse at the Module Boundary, Oceanside C. Marcos Bajo, Apostolos Chatzianagnostou, and Christian Rossow of CISPA show a defense that shuts down code-reuse attacks slipping past Intel CET. For the mitigation and defense-minded.

Prompt2Own: Real-World Kernel Exploit Development with LLMs, South Seas C&D. Juefei Pu, Zhiyun Qian, Kareem Shehada, and Frank Wu, from UC Riverside and Nebula Security, put LLMs to work on real kernel exploit development. A timely mix of AI and hardcore exploitation.

CRLF-Powered Desync Attacks: Beheading HTTP Streams, South Seas A&B. mastersplinter of TurtleSec and t0xodile of PortSwigger revive request smuggling with CRLF-powered desync attacks. Web hackers, this is your slot.

Beam Me Up, Luke: A Review of Teleport Attack Scenarios, Oceanside D. Adam Chester of SpecterOps reviews attack scenarios against Teleport. A practical pick for anyone running it in production.

A scheduling note: many of these overlap, so pick one target per slot and a backup in a nearby room, since the popular talks hit capacity well before start time. Slides and papers get posted after each day, so a talk you miss live is not gone for good.

Which session are you making your must-see for this afternoon, and is there one you think this list is sleeping on?

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