Cybersecurity conferences and events 2026

The title for largest cybersecurity conference in the world could go to any of the various cybersecurity conferences depending on what your definition of the largest conference is. The largest traditional cybersecurity conferences are the RSA Conference, the Black Hat Briefings, DEF CON, and the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit. If you expand the definition to include cybersecurity industry conferences, then they are dwarfed by OMR, which had around 70,000 participants in 2022 and 2023.

The two largest hacker conferences are DEF CON and its sister event Black Hat Briefings. Both conferences are visited by thousands of hackers, penetration testers, and other members of the hacking community each year.

The RSAC 2026 Conference will be held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, USA, on March 23-26, 2026.

The Gartner conference (also known as the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit) will be held in London, UK, on March 9-10, 2026.

Cybersecurity networking events can be any conferences, summits, or forums dedicated to cybersecurity. Most people visiting cybersecurity conferences already come hoping to meet their peers and make connections with industry experts. So, you may say that most such events are cybersecurity networking events. But you can also find events dedicated to meeting other cybersecurity professionals. They’re often smaller, local, and specifically designed to help people in cybersecurity meet each other, such as meetup events in your city and local OWASP chapters.

Infosec (information security) and cybersecurity are terms used interchangeably in popular culture, but they refer to slightly different things.

Infosec is the umbrella term for measures that deal with the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data, including tools that protect information outside of the digital space. Meanwhile, cybersecurity is a subset of infosec that is concerned with protecting digital systems (such as computers, mobile devices, and networks) from cyberthreats.

The two disciplines frequently overlap, but infosec is much broader in scope — for example, installing physical access controls to the server room falls under infosec but not cybersecurity.