Our AI strategy for preemptive security
Some kids dreamed of sleepaway camp. We dreamed of a week in the desert with 40,000 of our closest friends, a business hall the size of an airfield, and enough networking to make your social battery beg for mercy. Black Hat and DEF CON week is the one we circle on the calendar. This year, you’ll be able to find Bugcrowd just about everywhere you look.
Here’s where Bugcrowd will be across the week:
The business hall closes at 4pm on Thursday and suddenly, it’s a mad dash for the rideshare queue outside Mandalay Bay. Why not just keep the party going and blow off some steam playing putt-putt?
The Hive is a short walk from the show floor (no rideshare required) and it opens at exactly 4:00 PM, right as the hall empties out. Come spend that time with us instead:
We’re co-hosting this with HPE Networking. They’re bringing David Hughes, their SVP of Security & SASE, to the panel, plus John Spiegel and Jaye Tillson, who’ll be signing copies of Zero Trust Done Right at the book table. Between the three of them, they’ve got strong opinions about what breaks when AI-speed findings hit a network team. Go pressure-test them.
This year, we’re leaning into nostalgia. We have some of the OG Bugcrowd swag that we haven’t released in almost a decade, in the form of stickers and posters.
We have a couple snarky ballcaps, because we’re just as sick of the security cliches as you are.
And lastly, we have printed copies of our new zine, The Hacker Culture Manual. Here is the first look at the cover.
Each of them is working on something worth a conversation, and they’ll all be in the room. Go find them.
Pi is here fresh off a partnership with us. Our new integration takes a vulnerability reported through the Bugcrowd Platform and gets it validated, root-caused to the exact line of code, and routed with a proposed fix in as little as 30 minutes, with humans still in the loop.
Pi’s agentic AI platform is built around what its founders (ex-Tesla offensive security, ex-Microsoft) call a “security brain”: an institutional memory of how your org builds and breaks its own software. Finding bugs was always the easy part. Ask them about the hard part.
Cytix thinks point-in-time pentests are a bit silly when your team ships forty times a day. Their platform watches for change like a pull request, fresh threat intel, or a new server and triggers exactly the right test the moment risk shows up. CREST-accredited, continuously running, no waiting for the quarterly report.
Most AI agent projects never reach production, because nobody can prove they’re trustworthy. Vijil fixes that. Built by the AWS engineers behind the LLM engines in SageMaker and Bedrock, their platform hardens agents until they’re actually shippable… one customer went from six months to six weeks. Gartner® called them a Cool Vendor™. We just call them useful.
Every developer on your team has a coding agent with access to source code, prod, and CI/CD, plus a sprawl of MCP servers nobody’s inspecting. Manifold watches those agents at runtime and catches them when they misbehave. The team previously built LLM Guard, the most widely adopted open-source LLM firewall out there. They have opinions about what’s coming. Worth hearing.
Between the panel, the sessions, and a room full of people who came to unwind and connect, The Hive is where Black Hat’s best conversations continue. Bring your questions, your hard-won opinions, and your appetite for a candid debrief.
Register for The Hive at Black Hat USA 2026 →
The Hive takes place Thursday, August 6, 2026, at Swingers Las Vegas (inside Mandalay Bay). Space is limited and registration is required.