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.
Program
- Four-day format: Oct 5 arrival (team meetings and prep), Oct 6 Hardening Day (running an EC site under attack), Oct 7 Analysis Day (log review and networking), Oct 8 Softening Day (all teams disclose and share what happened)
- 96 selected participants organized by the committee into 12 teams of 8
- The attacker team Kuromame6 attacks during the competition; defending teams can buy products and services from MarketPlace vendors
- Public viewing on Hardening Day from 14:00 and all day on Softening Day (advance application, live online stream)
Speakers
- Youki Kadobayashi (Chair, Hardening Project Executive Committee, 2026)
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 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)
DevFest 2026 in Kansai
The 2026 edition of DevFest hosted by GDG Greater Kwansai. Sessions on AI and machine learning, security, hardware and IoT are combined with a generative-AI hands-on workshop and a panel discussion, free of charge for 500 attendees in Umeda, Osaka. Following Osaka in 2024 and Kobe in 2025, this third edition mixes students with working engineers in one venue.
Computer Security Symposium 2026 (CSS2026)
The central academic symposium for security research in Japan, run by IPSJ's Computer Security research group since 1998. It convenes co-located workshops on malware countermeasures (MWS), privacy (PWS) and usable security (UWS) across five days, spanning formal theory through psychological and social dimensions. The host city rotates annually, with Hamamatsu hosting in 2026.
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.