Ekoparty Buenos Aires 2026, held from October 7 to 9 at the Convention Center (CEC), once again established itself as the essential meeting point for the regional cybersecurity ecosystem. Throughout its history, the event has been enriched with various sections and specialized spaces, such as the popular Villages, which allow attendees to dig deep into highly specific technical niches. This new edition clearly reflects a process that began a couple of years ago, with changes aimed at adapting to the urgent demands of the market.
That corporate shift has progressively transformed the demographics of its halls, attracting professionals, decision-makers and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), while trying not to lose its community essence or its traditional hacker spirit. Today, the fair is a dynamic ecosystem where business concerns about new vulnerabilities converge directly with the commercial value offered by organizations, which showcase at their booths how they can help mitigate critical risks.
How is Artificial Intelligence affecting the new corporate attack surface?
The accelerated adoption of intelligent agents and interconnected applications exponentially expands organizations' vulnerable points. To mitigate these risks in real time, corporations are forced to continuously map their exposure surface and adopt offensive solutions that simulate cyberattacks before serious incidents occur.
The event offered attendees training sessions throughout the entire hall.
A tour of the booths revealed recurring themes: a barometer of the concerns of those taking part in the event. For Nicolás Grinberg, Head of Sales at Strike, AI has revolutionized the corporate conversation on issues such as speed, technical precision and the operating costs related to cyberattacks and defenses. The firm, which specializes in offensive cybersecurity solutions, helps companies accurately map their attack surface, a service in which less traditional business sectors, such as mining companies, are now being forced to invest heavily in the face of new digital threats.
Regarding the large international networking ecosystem the event generates, the executive greatly valued the quality of the people present: “I have the good fortune and privilege of traveling to events in the United States and throughout Latin America, and the truth is that leaders from across the region are here at Ekoparty too. It’s very interesting. Ultimately, this is an industry of trust. Yes, service providers sell ‘fear’, but there is also this trust we give each other between companies, clients, suppliers and the whole value chain, and all of that is really what’s key in this business,” said Grinberg.
Echoing this reading of an accelerated business environment, Sol Gatti, Country Manager of Radware for Argentina, warned that the main trend lies in protecting the new attack surfaces linked to corporate applications and to brand-new Artificial Intelligence agents. To address this, Radware —backed by Israeli technology originally developed for cyberwarfare and adapted to the private sector— updates its platform's capabilities and controls week by week to keep pace with cybercriminals and shape its network defenses in real time.
Gatti also pointed to other core drivers boosting their business, such as companies' extreme lack of visibility into shadow APIs and protection against denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks powered by intelligent bots. Analyzing Ekoparty's new profile, the executive welcomed the change and the abundant high-level interactions: “Last year I ran into a lot of CISOs. Maybe they’re not here all day, as other more technical profiles are, but they all stop by at some point to visit the booths or catch a talk. Honestly, for me that’s great, because it’s three days in which I get to meet everyone,” she stressed.
Why are Latin American companies facing growing technical debt in security?
Companies in the region are experiencing uncertainty as they integrate digital tools without upgrading their underlying IT infrastructure. Given this gap, market projections expect corporate security investment to triple in the short term, driving in-depth vulnerability assessments and the professionalization of access management.
This undeniable transformation in the audience's demographics serves as the ideal thermometer for gauging business priorities on a continental scale. Lautaro Pastorini, CEO of GEN IT, said that their first local participation as sponsors made clear the deep uncertainty that medium-sized and large organizations face when adopting new technologies securely and efficiently. From his analytical perspective, there is an enormous corporate technical debt across Latin America that is now being addressed through new waves of investment led from Argentina.
Pastorini emphasized that, according to projections from major international consulting firms, cybersecurity investment will triple in the short term, which was already generating multiple requests for infrastructure assessments at their booth: “We are in a time of great uncertainty. For many years it was very clear what needed to be done. Today, being clear about what to do is not so easy, because we are all innovating along different paths. Everyone comes and asks: ‘So what are you doing?’ Or they say: ‘I’m doing this’. That’s where a dynamic and a spectacular conversation start to take shape,” the executive reflected on the atmosphere in the halls.
In a parallel line of technology services that also requires a strong effort to educate the market, Diego Minguillón, founder of Plug Zone, highlighted the emerging interest in the security, unified management and governance of digital identities. Until just a few years ago, this kind of identity and access management (IAM) tool was restricted to the top of the corporate pyramid, for firms with tens of thousands of users, but today the technology has become dramatically widespread and has reached businesses of every size. The current business challenge, he said, lies in supporting organizations that know their operational pain points very well but are completely unaware that specific solutions exist to relieve them.
Analyzing the immediate return on their booth and the flow of attendees at Ekoparty, Minguillón was categorical about the strategy the organizers carried out to mature the fair commercially: “There was a clear and deliberate shift, driven by the organizers, from being a hacking exhibition with lots of young people interested in the subject to being more corporate. You can even notice it in the cost of the booths and the tickets,” he stated, confirming that they are now able to make direct contact with senior decision-makers and are taking away valuable, concrete business opportunities to close before the end of the year.
Shorter SSL validity periods: why is it urgent to automate IT operations?
The mandatory shortening of web certificate validity will make manual renewal unfeasible for medium-sized and large companies. As validity periods gradually go from 100 to 47 days, and then to 29 days by 2029, manual management will lead to service outages unless automation tools are implemented.
As Ekoparty's business visitors demand comprehensive and immediate answers, heavy day-to-day operational obstacles that require imminent resolution are also coming to light. Mario Gabriel Lilla, Sales Manager at Certisur (for the SSL and Automation lines), noted that a current technical headache for IT departments is the systematic shortening of SSL certificate validity periods. The expert warned visitors that this lifecycle will very soon go from 200 to 100 days, then be drastically reduced to 47 and end up at periods of just 29 days by 2029.
For a company like Certisur, the main value it brings in the face of this tight international timeline is providing the necessary automation tools, since it will be humanly impossible for large companies to complete manual installations on time. Alongside its successful regular operations with the tightly guarded financial system, Lilla noted the overall professionalization of the event, highlighting how the strict requirements of traditional banking constantly and harmoniously intersect with the genuine technical enthusiasm of young students starting out in cybersecurity.
Carefully assessing its in-person commercial venture and the symbolic return on its participation, the Certisur spokesperson was highly satisfied with the evolution and scope of the ecosystem as a whole: “The event really draws people in; we’re seeing a lot of activity, which is very good. It’s very well organized, at least in everything we’ve coordinated and discussed with the team, so we’re pleased,” Lilla said, referring both to the vibrant response from the specialized audience and to the outstanding logistical quality of this edition.
Quantum Village: how is Ekoparty preparing the industry for the quantum era?
Quantum computing threatens to make traditional cryptographic schemes obsolete in the short term. In the face of this challenge, the industry's preparation lies in assessing zero-day vulnerabilities, training new professionals and implementing robust (quantum-safe) encryption protocols before quantum computers become widespread.
Among Ekoparty's various highly specialized spaces, one of the most disruptive innovations was the Quantum Village, supported by Platinum Ciber. Cecilia Oriolo, the company's local head, explained that the main goal of the initiative is to prepare and strengthen the entire industry for the imminent arrival of Quantum Computing through “quantum-safe” cryptography protocols (protocols that remain suitable once quantum computing becomes widespread, or PQC). The organization's work seeks to thoroughly assess companies' core infrastructure, while actively researching how quantum supercomputers can identify previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities and build the necessary exploits in order to patch them in time.
Despite the event's decisive and beneficial corporate shift overall, Oriolo noted that pioneering technical topics such as quantum physics keep academia's genuine interest intact and ensure the essential generational renewal of IT talent: “Now there are many more young people. Lots of schools and universities are coming, but all together, not separately. In fact, in Quantum Computing several universities are already launching master's programs. There is much more diversification. We are seeing this in Education, knowing that it will be needed professionally in the future,” explained the Director of Platinum Ciber.
Complementing complex algorithmic theory with the classic competitive hacker adrenaline, this same Village hosted the famous CTF (Capture The Flag) challenge. Robert Covington, the American volunteer in charge of the game, brought to Buenos Aires the demanding set of exercises originally used at the DEF CON convention in Las Vegas. There, teams faced sophisticated hands-on challenges in open-source intelligence, data poisoning attacks, exploitation of logic flaws in simulated enterprise environments, and even a complex and challenging steganography maze kindly contributed by a local speaker.
To create greater technical immersion and connection with talent from the Spanish-speaking region, Covington creatively adapted much of the narrative background of his offensive simulation scenarios: “For the open-source intelligence parts, I used ChatGPT to translate some content into Spanish. However, part of the storyline behind the website of the fictitious company I created for this purpose differs from the one I used in Las Vegas. For example, in the United States the fictitious company is called ‘Carrot Quantum’, while here it is called ‘Zanahoria Cuántica’,” the volunteer said enthusiastically, noting that after just a day and a half of the event they already had 30 formally registered professionals and four elite squads that had managed to solve every puzzle to capture their flags.
It is in this balance between hacker adrenaline and corporate composure that Ekoparty has been navigating for a couple of years, showing in 2026 (amid AI agents that can unleash ruin or become a blessing, the sword of Damocles of Quantum Computing, and decisions by major players seeking to make the algorithmic transition even more dynamic) that both dynamics can successfully coexist.
Source:Enfasys