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 First competition held as a WASForum project
- 2025 Hardening 2025 Invisible Divide held in Tomigusuku, Okinawa, with 101 participants across 12 teams
- 2026 Hardening Designers Conference 2026 held online, July 2-4
- 2026 Main competition planned in Hakodate, October 5-8, with applications closing August 10
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)
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