We're officially one month out.
On Sept. 15-16, more than 3,000 cybersecurity professionals, hackers, researchers, executives, students and community members are expected to descend on Houston's George R. Brown Convention Center for CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026.
There will be more than 100 speakers, 200-plus exhibitors and more than 10 specialized tracks. There will be hands-on workshops, an interactive village, a startup pitch competition and programming covering everything from hacking and operational technology to AI, security leadership, careers and emerging threats.
But the numbers don't really explain what we're building. For that, you have to go back 16 years, because CYBR.SEC.CON. didn't begin as an attempt to build a massive cybersecurity conference. It began with roughly 120 people in Houston.
Before CYBR.SEC.CON., There Was HOU.SEC.CON.
In 2010, Michael Farnum and Sam Van Ryder created HOU.SEC.CON. around a pretty straightforward idea: Houston's cybersecurity practitioners needed a place to get together. Not another giant industry trade show or an event designed primarily around vendors. A community.
Farnum and Van Ryder had been involved in Houston's local security user groups, and HOU.SEC.CON. emerged from those efforts. The conference initially operated under the auspices of the National Information Security Group before eventually becoming independent.
About 120 people attended the first event. At various points, organizers thought perhaps HOU.SEC.CON. would grow to 300 people. Maybe 500. They were spectacularly wrong.
The community kept showing up. So did people from outside Houston.
By 2023, HOU.SEC.CON. had essentially broken the hotel-conference model. Tickets sold out six weeks before the event. Additional micro-booths created to accommodate sponsors sold out, too.
In 2024, the conference moved into a conference center for the first time, and attendance nearly doubled. People traveled to Houston from across the United States and from countries including the United Kingdom and Israel.
Something had clearly changed. HOU.SEC.CON. wasn't just Houston's security conference anymore.
HOU.SEC.CON. Becomes CYBR.SEC.CON.
Last year, the name finally caught up with the community: HOU.SEC.CON. became CYBR.SEC.CON.
That didn't mean abandoning Houston. The conference remains in Houston, and the people and community that spent more than a decade building HOU.SEC.CON. remain at its core.
The change acknowledged something that had already happened organically: The community had become national and the conference itself had become part of something larger.
CYBR.SEC.CON. now sits at the center of the broader CYBR.SEC.Community ecosystem, alongside CYBR.SEC.Media, CYBR.SEC.Careers, CYBR.HAK.CON., OT.SEC.CON. and other programs built around security education, workforce development, research and community.
Which brings us to 2026: This year's conference is probably the clearest expression yet of what that evolution was intended to create.
Four Specialized Conferences Under One Roof
One cybersecurity community doesn't mean one kind of cybersecurity professional. CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026 includes four major specialized tracks that essentially operate as conferences within the conference:
- OT.SEC.CON. brings together the operational technology and industrial cybersecurity communities.
- CYBR.HAK.CON. is built by and for hackers, with hands-on security, offensive research and deeply technical content.
- EXEC.SEC.CON. is designed for current and aspiring security leaders dealing with the strategic and organizational realities of running security programs.
- AI.SEC.CON. brings together cybersecurity practitioners, AI innovators, engineers and researchers confronting the collision between artificial intelligence and security.
Those tracks sit alongside programming covering careers and mentorship, cloud and application security, identity, data security, threat research, red/blue/purple teaming and emerging threats.
Four Keynotes, Four Different Corners of Security
The keynote lineup reflects that same philosophy.
Security pioneer Winn Schwartau, Cisco Talos security strategist Joe Marshall, former Akamai CSO and Duha CEO and Principal Andy Ellis, and Entergy VP and CISO Ann Delenela bring perspectives spanning security history, threat research, leadership and critical infrastructure.
There isn't one definition of a cybersecurity leader represented there. That's the point.
Yes, WOPR Will Be There
There is another piece of HOU.SEC.CON. history that survived the transformation into CYBR.SEC.CON.
For HOU.SEC.CON. 2015, organizers embraced a WarGames theme and built a replica of the movie's War Operation Plan Response computer — WOPR. It was supposed to be a conference prop. Apparently nobody told WOPR.
More than a decade later, it continues turning up at OT.SEC.CON., CYBR.HAK.CON. and CYBR.SEC.CON., becoming one of the community's most recognizable pieces of conference history.
The Hard Part Comes Next
Growing a conference is one thing. Growing it without destroying what made people care about it is something else. A 120-person security gathering feels like a community almost automatically. A 3,000-person conference doesn't. You have to work at it.
That's why the specialized tracks matter. It's why the villages matter. It's why hands-on workshops matter. It's why career programming and mentorship matter. It's why hacker culture belongs in the same building as executive leadership. And it's why CYBR.SEC.CON. still happens in Houston.
The goal was never to take a regional security conference, make it huge and turn it into another interchangeable stop on the cybersecurity conference circuit.
The goal is to take what worked about HOU.SEC.CON. and see how far we can push it. Now we're one month away from CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026.
If you've been part of HOU.SEC.CON. over the years, come see what it has become.
If you've joined us at CYBR.HAK.CON. or OT.SEC.CON., come meet the rest of the community.
If you're a hacker, defender, CISO, researcher, engineer, student, job seeker, builder, educator or just someone who cares about where cybersecurity is going, there's a place for you here.
And if you've never attended one of our events before, this is a pretty good year to start.
On Sept. 15 and 16, we're putting hackers and CISOs, AI and OT, students and veterans, researchers and builders under one roof in Houston.
Not because they all do the same thing.
Because they're all part of the same community.
Get your ticket. Come to Houston. Join us at CYBR.SEC.CON. 2026.
