The Colab Brief - 131: Black Hat Goes Dark 💡

Is the in-person conference dead? 

Serious question. 

Black Hat used to be the premiere event for the cybersecurity industry, but this year was, frankly…a little lackluster. 

We’ve noticed this trend in other conferences, too. Of course, we had the COVID pause and then the rush to mingle again, but now it seems like we’re all a bit burnt out. 

With attendance low and an unfortunate lampshade incident (don’t worry, we’ll get into it), does this signal the death knell of the mega-industry show?

Read Time: 3 minutes.

Welcome to the (Big) Show 🎪

Let’s be clear: the mega brands are still investing in Black Hat. While the big guys continued to dump money into elaborate displays and insane booth setups, the midsized/startup landscape looked a little meager. 

In addition to having a sparse startup section, our booth informants noted that they’d received fewer leads this year than ever before, making those expensive displays a bit hard to justify for 2025. 

So why the change? 

Maybe we’re all used to operating in a remote-first world. Perhaps the economy is taking its toll on those multi-figure booth bids. Maybe the lure of Las Vegas is losing its luster (that can’t be it). 

Feedback from our friendlies? The smaller shows have been more impactful for drumming up legit leads. 

The Media was (Mostly) Missing 🔍

Pre-Black Hat used to be a crazy pitching time for our firm. With multiple clients attending, we spent weeks beating the streets, scheduling coffee meetings, briefing reporters on new products, and generally working our tails off to get attention. This year, we still did our typical full-court press, but the majority of our usual suspects were missing from the show. 

Is it because the outlets just aren’t paying to send reporters? Is the ROI simply not there at the end of the day? Can they get all the information they need by doing remote interviews?

Everyone seemed to have a slightly different justification, but at the end of the day, less media is a loss for the show, which used to be a pretty sweet place to rub elbows with cybersecurity reporters from a variety of outlets. 

The Lampshade Incident 🛋️

You know how they say all press is good press? This is not one of those situations. Palo Alto Networks landed in hot water with their Black Hat stunt, in which they used women as "human lamps" with covered faces—yikes! Who approves of these things?

The move was slammed as sexist and went quite viral on LinkedIn. Eventually, the top execs admitted it was a major misstep, but not before they were read to filth by the LI community. 

The internet had thoughts: 

I’m still confused about how this happened in the first place in 2024, but I digress. 

A New Era? 🔮

So Black Hat was slow and had a problematic party scene. What’s spurring the shift from a must-attend show to a skippable scene?

Maybe the simple answer is that people want to spend less of their free time in huge, noisy centers being overstimulated by salespeople. Maybe spending tens of thousands of dollars to set up a booth next to every single one of your competitors isn’t the best way to find legitimate customers. 

Maybe we’re all more interested in small group conversations and not so fascinated by the large speaker scene. Maybe there isn’t a reason to go when you can access basically everything online. 

All we know for sure is that our clients are doubling down on smaller, more focused events and slowly peeling away from the Black Hats of the world. And we’re in full support. 

Until next time -

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