Meet with Cobalt at it-sa Expo&Congress 2026

Attack surfaces across cloud infrastructure, APIs, and AI applications are expanding faster than periodic testing can validate. Automated tools generate a high volume of alerts without the context required for prioritization, and security teams face persistent talent shortages across the DACH region and wider EU market.

At the same time, compliance requirements under frameworks such as ISO 27001 and GDPR demand continuous evidence, not annual snapshots. Point-in-time testing leaves exposure windows that modern threat actors, including AI-enabled ones, can exploit before the next scheduled assessment.

AI-powered offensive security testing grounded in human expertise

Humans over hype is not a tagline. It's the architecture. The Cobalt Offensive Security Platform runs AI-driven discovery and orchestration at scale, governed by the Cobalt Core, a global network of 500+ vetted pentesters. The Cobalt Core validates exploitability, uncovers business logic flaws and chained attack paths automation misses, and prevents autonomous testing from introducing unintended risk into your environment.

At it-sa Expo and Congress, let’s discuss your specific environment with Cobalt executives and solutions architects at Hall 6, Stand 434A. The conversation is structured around your requirements: architecture, compliance obligations, and measurable outcomes.

Key Benefits:

Review your compliance posture directly. Discuss how continuous offensive security supports evidence requirements under ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR.
Assess your attack surface with a solutions architect. Identify specific exposure windows across cloud, API, and AI/LLM environments.
Examine the platform's methodology. Understand how the Cobalt Offensive Security Platform launches pentests within hours and delivers real-time, verifiable findings.
Review benchmark data. Access findings from more than 5,000 pentests conducted annually and over 10,000 documented critical or high-severity vulnerabilities.
Understand the human validation layer. Learn how Cobalt Core pentesters verify every automated finding before it reaches your team, ensuring no result reaches you unvalidated.

While many continuous solutions rely solely on AI and scripts, the human validation provided at Cobalt is the key differentiator. By leveraging Cobalt's pentesting expertise, we move beyond the noise of raw data, allowing our team to focus on high-impact remediation rather than manual de-duplication.

Jon Cheuvront

Sr. Security Engineer, Gallagher

DEF CON 34

Hacking Big Iron: When Modern Security Assumptions Fail on Mainframes

DATE TBA

Mainframes still underpin critical infrastructure such as banking, airlines, and government systems, yet most modern security teams approach them using assumptions formed around Unix, Windows, and enterprise platforms. These assumptions often fail on z/OS, creating blind spots that are difficult to detect and easy to underestimate.

This talk explains how mainframe security actually works and why familiar concepts such as "root," shells, ports, and lateral movement do not translate cleanly. Focusing on components like JES, JCL, RACF, CICS, and PR/SM, we explore where attackers and defenders truly operate today: transactions, security managers, and management boundaries.

BLACK HAT USA

MCParasite: Universal MCP Worm Security Testing Framework

Aug 6, 2026 | 11:20 AM PDT

MCParasite takes prompt injection and tool poisoning techniques that already exist and chains them into a self-propagating worm that lives inside MCP. A single rogue server poisons the agent's context the moment it connects.

The agent then writes a payload to whatever channel it has access to: Slack, GitHub, Jira, email. A completely separate agent on a different system reads that message, gets infected, and starts executing commands on its own. Shell access, credential theft, data exfiltration. The victim agent never touched the malicious server. We tested 8 models from 4 vendors. 5 out of 6 propagated the worm. We are actively expanding to DeepSeek and others; the talk will cover full results across all major frontier models.

DEF CON 34

Deep Dive into Fuzzing (Course)

Aug 10 - 11, 2026 | 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM PDT

Attendees would be emulating techniques which would provide a comprehensive understanding of "Crash, Detect & Triage" of fuzzed binaries or software. In "Deep dive into fuzzing" we will be covering a detailed overview of fuzzing and how it can be beneficial to professionals in uncovering security vulnerabilities with a hands-on approach through focus on labs.

Finding vulnerabilities in software requires in-depth knowledge of different technology stacks. Modern day software’s have a huge codebase and may contain vulnerabilities, manually verifying such vulnerabilities is a tedious task and may not be possible in all cases. This training is designed in such a way that it introduces the concept of fuzzing and vulnerability discovery in software’s covering multiple platforms such as Linux & Windows and triage analysis for those vulnerabilities.

it-sa Expo&Congress 2026 - NUREMBERG, GERMANY