News

Riyadh’s Black Hat MEA Exhibition Will Be The Biggest Yet

The event is now 60% larger and will feature a new Black Hat Campus, Deep Dive Stage, Investor Program, CyberSeed Startup Competition, and more.

Published

3 years ago

October 24, 2023

Nour Nasir

Black Hat MEA

Black Hat Middle East and Africa (MEA), is the cybersecurity industry’s fastest-growing cybersecurity expo, and will soon open its doors in a three-day event at the Riyadh Front Exhibition & Convention Center, November 14-16.

Black Hat MEA 2023 is the world’s largest cyber security event, with 40,000 attendees. The expo will feature 300 exhibitors and 100 speakers, all connected by the “Infosec on the Edge” theme. The conference has attracted many industry heavy-hitters, including Cisco, Huawei, Ali Baba Cloud, Palo Alto, Kaspersky, and Zscaler, whose Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer Sam Curry explained the importance of the event:

“The rapid pace of innovation among attackers demands innovation and application of new approaches to cybersecurity like ZeroTrust and applied Artificial Intelligence. That starts with a cultural nexus like Black Hat MEA in Riyadh, where we bring together the global cyber community and open the doors to the next generation because, in cyber, diversity and inclusion aren’t just the right thing to do; they are a competitive advantage and the key to the future of the digital world”.

black hat middle east and africa 2023

Highlights for 2023 include a Black Hat Campus and Deep Dive Stage, where cyber experts explore prevailing cybersecurity threats, and an Investor Program, where 80 potential backers will hunt for promising startups to fund.

Meanwhile, developers will showcase open-source tools and products in a section of the center called The Arsenal. Finally, an ethical hacking Capture The Flag tournament will take place in the Activities Zone, with 1,000 participants in 250 teams using their forensic, crypto, and reverse engineering skills to grab a portion of the USD 187,000 prize fund.

Also Read: The Largest Data Breaches In The Middle East

As cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated, public and private companies in the MEA region and beyond are coming together to search for meaningful technologies and solutions to combat them. Black Hat MEA will act as a key conduit and meeting place for world-renowned experts to share ideas and develop defensive measures.

Exhibitor and attendee registrations for the Black Hat MEA event are open now at BlackHatMEA.com.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

Also Read: Dubai Says Its Deepfake Detector Needs Just 7 Seconds Of Video

“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.