CHCon, New Zealand's dedicated hacker and information-security conference, returns to Majestic on Durham in Christchurch on 18–20 November 2026 for its 10th-birthday edition.
CHCon, the Christchurch Hacker Conference, is New Zealand's dedicated hacker and information-security conference, and its 2026 edition runs 18–20 November at Majestic on Durham in central Christchurch. The organisers' site (2026.chcon.nz) sets out a three-part format: a training day on Wednesday 18 November followed by two days of talks on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 November. The 2026 event carries the theme "Welcome to the Clown Show" and, per the infosecmap listing, is pegged to the conference's 10th birthday.
CHCon is a community-run conference rather than a commercial trade show. The official site is operated under the name Swamp Chicken Cyber Industries Ltd (per the footer of 2026.chcon.nz) and the event is tied into the wider New Zealand infosec community, with the site linking to the "infosecnz" Discord. According to the InfoconDB conference database, CHCon has run annually since its first edition on 12 November 2016, through editions from 2017 to 2021, a 2022 edition styled the "Canterbury Hacker Camp," and further conferences in 2023, 2024 and 2025. That decade of continuity is what the 2026 "10th birthday" framing refers to.
The aggregator infosec-conferences.com describes CHCon as "a conference for security professionals and hackers in Christchurch, NZ," and the official site positions it as New Zealand's dedicated hacker conference. The programme pairs hands-on training on the opening day with two days of community talks. The organisers' published timeline has the Call for Training closing 31 July 2026 and the Call for Papers opening 1 June and closing 15 September 2026, with speaker selection at the end of September. Delegate numbers are community-scaled; infosec-conferences.com lists an attendance band of roughly 100–300.
The 2026 conference is held at Majestic on Durham, the events arm of the Majestic Church building at 189 Durham Street South in Christchurch's central city (address per the infosecmap listing, which links through to the venue's own site). According to the structural engineers Structex, the building is a retrofitted industrial complex completed as a church-and-events facility in 2020; it occupies roughly 3,200 square metres including parking, and its main auditorium seats over 300 people, with foyer, green-room, kitchen and outdoor spaces alongside. The site is in the Christchurch CBD, within walking distance of central-city hotels and public-transport routes, and about a 15-minute drive from Christchurch International Airport.
CHCon is one of the anchor events on New Zealand's information-security calendar and the leading infosec gathering in the South Island. For Christchurch's business-events sector it is a recurring, community-owned conference that reliably brings security practitioners, trainers and students into the central city each spring, and its move into a purpose-built central-city venue underlines Christchurch's post-rebuild capacity to host specialist technical conferences.
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