Both Defcon and Black Hat, originally scheduled for August, have cancelled in-person events, instead opting to host conferences online
and I, for one, am looking forward to it 😈 https://twitter.com/... Marc Rogers / @marcwrogers : DEF CON is officially cancelled. https://forum.defcon.org/... we will be putting on an online event instead. Details in the post. #DEFCON #DEFCONisCANCELLED @alethedenis : Can a @defcon goon please call me like every 25 minutes during what would have been #hackersummercamp and yell at me to stop blocking the fire exits and to keep moving? https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Lily Hay Newman / @lilyhnewman : defcon is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, canceled https://www.wired.com/... Fr. Robert R. Ballecer / @padresj : Wait... @defcon is cancelled? But it's cancelled every year... is this cancelled cancelled, or cancelled CANCELLED? And if it's cancelled CANCELLED, is that really just a way to keep away the people who are no longer discouraged by it being cancelled? https://forum.defcon.org/... Kim Zetter / @kimzetter : It's official. Defcon is cancelled this year. For real this time. But they'll be doing this: “Even though our in-person Las Vegas event is canceled, we will run DEF CON 28 Safe Mode August 7-9 (Friday through Sunday) with 101 orientation Thursday - all of it remote.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The two anchor events of hacker summer camp are gone: Defcon and Black Hat have both scrapped their August Las Vegas gatherings for online conferences, removing the industry's densest annual concentration of researchers, recruiters, and tool vendors from the physical calendar. The decision lands a year after attendees used the event for open soul-searching about why people still get hacked — a conversation that now has no ballroom to happen in.
The cancellation also sets up a test case for the rest of the trade-show circuit. The Consumer Technology Association initially insisted next January's CES would run both physically in Las Vegas and digitally, before reversing course and going all-digital — a sequence that suggests event organizers are discovering hybrid promises are harder to keep than digital ones.
First-order effects
- Black Hat's paid training and briefing business and Defcon's volunteer-run village model both move to remote formats immediately, stripping out the hallway track, live exploit demos, and the goon-run floor logistics that define the in-person experience.
- Las Vegas loses its two largest August cybersecurity conventions, hitting the hotels, convention staffing, and vendor travel budgets that anchored the summer season.
Second-order effects
- Every remaining 2020–2021 tech conference now has to price its own risk against this precedent — CTA's flip-flop from a physical-plus-digital CES to an all-virtual show shows organizers reading each other's cancellations rather than acting independently.
- Security vendors that budget booth spend and product launches around these two events must redirect that spend into the online formats or into their own channels, shifting marketing weight toward whoever runs the best virtual venue.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the calendar, the industry's conference structure splits: paid, production-heavy events like Black Hat professionalize online delivery, while community events like Defcon experiment with distributed formats — and the question of whether informal researcher-to-researcher contact survives the transition becomes structural rather than sentimental.
The trend: Tech's flagship conferences are abandoning physical formats outright rather than running hybrids, with each high-profile cancellation making the next organizer's all-digital pivot easier to justify.