Blackhoodie at DistrictCon 2026

Why, hello! BlackHoodie is super excited to be partnering with DistrictCon in 2026, bringing a day of vulnerability hunting in binaries to Washington DC! Come join us for an exciting day of reverse engineering and binary bug hunting, where you’ll wonder, wait that buffer isn’t big enough now, is it; more than once. The training welcomes beginners, the learning curve is steep, but who likes shallow anyway. It’s gonna be fun, challenging, and hey, bugs!!

TL;DR:

What: introductory class on vulnerability discovery in binaries

When: January 23rd, 9am to 5pm

Where: Washington DC

Who: Women

Registration: fill form here (registration open until we reach capacity)

Fees: The training is free; food, travel and hotel is responsibility of attendees

Agenda

Introduction to Vulnerability Hunting in Binaries

Teachers: Marion Marschalek (@pinkflawd) and Morgan Whitlow (@synapticrewrite)

Topic: This class will introduce students to reverse engineering x86-64 binaries with the goal of discovering simple vulnerabilities. We’ll briskly cover the basics of reverse engineering, and mostly focus on our disassembly framework of choice to learn how to uncover suspicious patterns in a binary. The target binaries will be real-world applications, where we’ll aim to reverse engineer our way to spot buffer overflows, type confustions and off-by-one errors.

Prerequisites: Bring a laptop with IDAPro Free installed, class materials will be hosted on github.

What is BlackHoodie?

BlackHoodie is a free, women only reverse engineering workshop and community. More information can be found here: https://www.blackhoodie.re/about/

Why women-only?

One qualifies to attend an in-person bootcamp either if born and raised female, or if one identifies as a woman. This concept of women-only has no intention of putting up walls or feeling exclusive. Blackhoodie is about creating space in an industry that’s very competitive. It is a comfortable place, where attendees feel encouraged to grow skills without pressure. We do what we do, not to create women-only bubbles, as contradicting as it might sound, but to enable a minority to enter the security space, learn skills that are otherwise expensive to learn, find their interests and grow a professional network.

And, it works. BlackHoodie alumnae have gone far beyond being successful in the classroom since the workshop series started. They ventured out to start community projects and collaborations, got themselves new jobs in the security industry, went to speak at major security conferences, joined review boards and become influencers in our community. Many went on to mentor others after they had found their spot, came back to BlackHoodie to give trainings on their own or are now conference trainers and teach classes to the community.

Finally, why does the security industry need more women at all? The industry is growing and facing a talent shortage. More importantly, jobs are typically well paid, come with certain privileges, and are challenging and often fulfilling. And we do firmly believe our society as a whole can only benefit from having more women with money, independence and confidence. Likewise, the tech sector has grown in size and influence, and with great power comes great responsibility – responsibility best shared among a diverse body of decision makers.