Hardening 2026 Agentic Collapse
Overview
An annual security hardening competition where teams defend an e-commerce site under live attack, competing on business continuity and sales. Japan's foremost hands-on exercise since 2012, with selected participants forming mixed teams. In 2025, 101 took part, 90% first-timers. The 2026 edition moves to Hakodate under the theme "Agentic Collapse," testing defense in the AI-agent era.
Foundation
- Founded
- 2012
- Founder
- WASForum (Web Application Security Forum) Hardening Project
Launched in 2012 as a competition testing the ability to defend vulnerable business systems. Combining an 8-hour defense round (Hardening Day) with a retrospective (Softening Day), it has been held annually, primarily in Okinawa.
Transition
- 2012 WASForumのプロジェクトとして初の競技会を開催
- 2025 Hardening 2025 Invisible Divideを沖縄・豊見城で開催、12チーム101名が参加
- 2026 Hardening Designers Conference 2026をオンライン開催（7月2〜4日）
- 2026 競技会本編を函館で開催予定（10月5〜8日、応募締切8月10日）
Voices
A security engineer reflects on over a month of preparation and competition-day response at Hardening 2025 (from the NEC Security Blog diary, in Japanese)
A report describing how the 2025 edition offered a safe way to experience incident response rarely encountered in daily work (from Proactive Defense's report, in Japanese)
A record of competing in a cross-organization mixed team (from an NTT West engineer's Hardening 2025 report, in Japanese)
Cloud Operator Days Tokyo 2026
An annual conference dedicated to cloud infrastructure operators. Launched in 2020 as the successor to OpenStack Days Tokyo, it focuses on sharing successes, failures, and know-how from operations. Typically combining summer on-demand sessions with an in-person closing event, the 2026 finale takes place September 11 at docomo R&D OPEN LAB ODAIBA in Odaiba.
Platform Engineering Kaigi 2026
The third edition of Japan's conference dedicated to platform engineering. The 2026 theme is "AI Native Platform Engineering," sharing hands-on knowledge of building developer platforms that embed AI agents. Grown out of the Platform Engineering Meetup community in 2024, it draws platform engineers, SREs, and CTOs.
Security Days Fall 2026
One of Japan's largest cybersecurity exhibition-and-seminar events, organized by Nano Opt Media. Held twice a year, the autumn edition tours five cities including Sapporo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Tokyo, and Nagoya. It delivers, free of charge, the latest incident trends and defenses against ransomware and targeted attacks for practitioners. The Tokyo venue alone draws cumulative session attendance of around 16,000.