Closing in on the Higgs boson?

One of the main missing pieces of the puzzle of high energy physics is the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking which could explain the origin of particle masses. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts in this context the existence of a new, yet undiscovered particle, the Higgs boson.
The LEP experiments set a lower limit of 114.4 GeV on the unknown mass of the Higgs boson, while higher masses have been constrained recently by the searches at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Over the past year and a half in particular the allowed mass range has been substantially narrowed down by the LHC experiments, leaving open only a small region around 120 GeV. In this talk the latest status of the search for the Higgs boson is presented, based on the proton-proton collison data recorded during 2011 and 2012 at the LHC. Possible first hints for a Higgs signal shall be addressed, as measured by the ATLAS and CMS experiments.