Fresh off their trip to scorching Las Vegas earlier this month, three cybersecurity reporters — TechTarget's Alissa Irei, Cybersecurity Dive's Eric Geller, and Dark Reading's Becky Bracken — talk through the highlights and themes of Black Hat USA 2026.
Undeniably, cybersecurity has reached an inflection point, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). And this year's conference was where many of the greatest cybersecurity minds came together to propose their strategies for grappling with defending against AI. Experts arrived in the desert armed with frameworks, research, observations, and revelations all intended to shore up traditional defenses against threat actors armed with weapons that are anything but traditional.
The turmoil within the CVE program, OpenAI's "mind blowing" revelations about its rogue agents, the future of VulnOps, and AI regulation were just a few of the top-line concerns on the minds of defenders milling around the halls of the Mandalay Bay in 2026, and these reporters were there to ask questions and find as many answers as possible.
Here's what they know.
Learn more in the video, and also check out our Reporters' Notebook full series, available here, which is designed to bring together insights and coverage from across Informa TechTarget's network of cybersecurity sister sites.
Eric Geller, Alissa Irei & Becky Bracken: Full Video Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity, readability, and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant and human editors. For the full experience, please watch the video.
TechTarget Cybersecurity's Alissa Irei: Welcome back to another Reporter's Notebook. I'm Alissa Irei, Senior Site Editor at TechTarget Cybersecurity, and I'm here with Eric and Becky. I'll let you introduce yourselves.
Cybersecurity Dive's Eric Geller: Hi, I'm Eric Geller, senior reporter at Cybersecurity Dive.
Dark Reading's Becky Bracken: I am Becky Bracken, Senior Editor with Dark Reading and happy to be here with you guys.
TTC's Alissa Irei: We're here to talk Black Hat, where we all were in lovely, cool, temperate Las Vegas and two letters, unsurprisingly, were top of mind for everybody: AI, AI, AI. What did you guys see and hear in terms of artificial intelligence this year?
CD's Eric Geller: Well, for me, there were a couple of big themes. The first was there's a lot of concern about what's going to happen to the CVE program, which assigns numbers to vulnerabilities and has kind of been tracking the vulnerability ecosystem for decades now. There's a lot of concern about what happens in the AI era when people are using these tools to discover bugs and report them at a rate that is completely unprecedented. I think probably the No. 1 most common theme for the sessions I attended was the CVE program, people talking about it from all different angles, including: Do we need to reform the program so that it can keep up with the onslaught of vulnerability reports that we're seeing right now?
And I would say there was a mix of opinions. You have folks who say that the program can scale. It scaled in the past, like when fuzzing became a thing and people started finding a lot more bugs because of fuzzing. And then there's other folks who say that this is categorically different and we need a different approach to cataloging vulnerabilities because we're going to see so many more of them and so many of them are going to be inaccurate because the AI tool is going to hallucinate a bug where one doesn't exist or it's going to describe it poorly. We need a new way of dealing with bug reports in an era where so many of them come from an automated system. So that's got to be one of the big things for me.
And then the other one was governance. And I mean that in mostly a policy context. There was not a lot of folks there from the government, senior folks, but the few people who were there really made a point of saying the government right now believes that AI can be left to mostly govern itself, but they're going to be watching to make sure that we don't have a crisis spawned by a really powerful tool that gets out and does something really bad. And of course you have all these conversations happening against the backdrop of the OpenAI and Anthropic disclosures about how their models went rogue, escaped their test environments, and hacked into real organizations.