On September 29–30, the Palace of Independence in Astana will host KazHackStan 2026. The landmark practical cybersecurity conference will showcase live attack simulations demonstrating how to safeguard citizens from digital fraud and protect corporate and critical state infrastructure from sophisticated breaches.
The central theme of this year’s conference is cyber resilience. The underlying philosophy is simple: in today’s threat landscape, preventing 100% of attacks is impossible. When a breach inevitably occurs, an organization’s systems must maintain critical continuity, limit lateral movement, and recover operational stability without systemic downtime or data loss.
Live Cyber Polygon: Testing Industrial and Banking Defenses
A key attraction of KazHackStan is its full-scale Cyber Polygon — a simulated smart city infrastructure containing mock banking cores, power substations, smart utility grids, and telecommunication switches. Teams of elite white-hat ethical hackers (Red Teams) will attempt real-time intrusions against defensive security operations centers (Blue Teams).
- SCADA and Industrial IoT Attacks: Demonstrating vulnerabilities in programmable logic controllers (PLCs) regulating water pressure and energy grids.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography & AI Phishing: Real-time generation of conversational deepfake voice clones and algorithmic credential theft.
- ATM and Hardware Hacking: Hands-on exploration of black-box cash dispenser jackpotting and contactless card relay exploitation.
Uniting Enterprise Security and State Regulators
Organized by the TSARKA Group with support from the Ministry of Digital Development, KazHackStan 2026 convenes over 3,000 international infosec practitioners, CISOs, national CERT teams, and software security researchers from across Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Conference keynotes and technical workshops will dissect recent high-profile ransomware campaigns, zero-day supply-chain vulnerabilities, and practical implementation strategies for zero-trust architectures in both cloud and on-premises enterprise environments.
