Hack The Box wins 2026 industry awards as it builds the future of cyber readiness

Hack The Box (HTB) has earned two 2026 industry awards, adding to a period of strong momentum across enterprise cyber readiness, defensive security, and AI security innovation. The company was named Gold Winner in the Cybersecurity Training category of the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards and a winner in the Trailblazing Cybersecurity Training category of the 2026 Global InfoSec Awards. HTB was also named a 2026 SC Awards finalist for Best IT Security-related Training Program, a recognition that reflects the platform’s innovation, product strength, and continued growth in cybersecurity training and workforce development.

But the bigger story is not the awards themselves. It is what they reflect: a market shifting beyond one-time training and toward continuous, measurable readiness alongside a monumental AI transformation in the industry.

That transformation sits at the center of HTB’s strategy. HTB aims to redefine cybersecurity capability for the hybrid human-AI era by building an end-to-end platform that develops, measures, and validates readiness across the full workforce lifecycle: upskilling, assessment, operational readiness, talent evaluation, and AI-driven defense. The premise is simple: traditional training, static learning paths, and point-in-time validation are no longer enough for a threat landscape shaped by agentic systems, fast-moving tradecraft, and increasingly unpredictable attack paths. Security leaders now need evidence-based readiness they can trust.

That vision is already showing up in the market. In The Forrester Wave™: Cybersecurity Skills and Training Platforms, Q1 2026, HTB was named a Leader, improved its overall offering score from 3.40 to 4.00, rose to the No. 2 position among vendors evaluated, and earned the highest possible score in Agentic AI Readiness. It also made major gains in enterprise-critical areas such as security framework mapping, talent ecosystem integration, accessibility, product security, and security and risk ecosystem capabilities.

Behind that momentum is deliberate product expansion. Over the past year, HTB has expanded across offensive, defensive, and cross-functional cyber readiness through the acquisition of LetsDefend to strengthen blue team and SOC capabilities, the launch of Threat Range for enterprise-scale cyber crisis simulation, and the continued growth of role-based certifications and pathways aligned to real-world job functions. Today, HTB supports 1,500+ organizations worldwide, a growing community of 4M+ cybersecurity professionals, and more than 20 million drill-hours annually.

AI has been woven into our DNA for multiple years. HTB has been building the environments, benchmarks, and validation signals organizations need to trust AI in live security operations. In 2024, we began working with Google to partner on an AI Red Teamer job role path, which led us to the Certified Offensive AI Expert (HTB COAE) - launched on April 2 - a hands-on certification that caps the AI Red Teamer Job-Role Path and validates advanced offensive AI security skills. In late 2025, HTB launched HTB AI Range, the world’s first controlled AI cyber range for testing and benchmarking autonomous security agents in live adversarial environments. This work is now reinforced by a recent UK AI Safety Institute study, which selected HTB as one of only two providers to build bespoke environments for evaluating seven frontier models, among others, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos. The study underscored the value of HTB’s realistic, high-fidelity ranges, where frontier models showed limited performance in its industrial control system environment. The impact on the industry is clear. HTB is helping define how advanced AI systems are stress-tested, benchmarked, and operationalized under real cyber conditions. 

Another reason this moment matters: the product story is backed by ecosystem reach and community depth. HTB’s global community is not just a number; it is part of the platform’s moat, helping drive realism, content freshness, and benchmark scale. That same expansion is also visible in how HTB is showing up in the market, extending into workforce and institutional channels, including becoming LinkedIn Learning’s first cybersecurity training labs partner and being appointed to support mission-aligned cyber readiness training for the FBI.

“This year's winners represent the cutting edge of cyber defense. They're not just keeping up, they're staying ahead, delivering tomorrow's cybersecurity solutions today,” said Gary S. Miliefsky, Publisher, Cyber Defense Magazine.

“Hack The Box has evolved into a platform we can confidently operate at enterprise scale, particularly for strengthening defensive readiness,” said Balaji Prakash Rao, Chief Product Security Officer and Deputy CISO at Resideo. “We use it to build consistent capabilities across roles, align training to industry frameworks, and measure progress through reporting that supports real-world security operations. What stands out most is Hack The Box’s continued investment in what’s next—operational readiness and AI-augmented security, while maintaining the hands-on, realistic simulations that drive measurable improvements for our cybersecurity teams.”

Taken together, these awards matter because they validate the direction HTB is pushing the market: from training to hybrid human-in-the-loop readiness, from static learning to operational measurement, and from human-only development to human–AI cyber resilience. HTB is building for a world where organizations need to trust not only that their people have learned, but that their teams, and increasingly their AI, are actually ready.