BHStats looks at Israeli representation at Black Hat USA Briefings from 2016 to 2026: how many speakers and sessions are Israeli each year, plus breakdowns by research subject, company and country. A toggle switches every chart between counting everyone credited on a talk and on-stage presenters only.
It's all public data from the Black Hat USA Briefings schedules - the talks and speakers (name, job title, company, bio) that Black Hat publishes for each conference. We took the schedule for every year:
20162017201820192020202120222023202420252026
Older years were retrieved via the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine). This is an independent, just-for-fun project built on public data - not affiliated with Black Hat in any way.
We count someone as Israeli if they look like they were born and raised in Israel - for instance because they studied at an Israeli university, served in the army (IDF, Unit 8200, Talpiot and similar), worked at Israeli companies, or their bio mentions Israel, alongside other small signals. It's a statement about the person, not their employer - an Israeli at a US company still counts. We made these calls with the help of our friendly LLMs reading bios and searching the web, backed by manual checks on the uncertain ones.
The aim is simply to show the trends of Israeli representation at Black Hat USA over the years - the number and share of Israeli speakers and sessions, the topics they focus on, and how Israel compares with other countries.
This is an inference with some manual checking, presented as aggregate trends - not an authoritative claim about anyone's nationality. We tried hard to get it right, but things can be wrong, and we genuinely welcome corrections.
2026 is still provisional - the program is filling in and more talks may be accepted, so that year's numbers can still change.
A fun side project by Stav Cohen on public data. More of my stuff: stavc.github.io/Web.