SBA Hosts Austrian CTF Team KuK Hofhackerei During DEFCON Qualifiers
On the Pentecost weekend, SBA hosted the Austrian CTF team “KuK Hofhackerei” as they participated in the DEFCON CTF Qualifiers.
Trying to repeat the success of the previous year, the team was hacking around the clock for 48h straight. Despite the heroic effort, many group orders of pizza and questionable amounts of caffeine consumed, it was not enough to qualify, as the team landed on rank 16 and only the top 12 teams qualify for the on-site finals in Vegas.
As this year was the first year where LLMs were good enough to solve DEFCON-level challenges, rank 16 out of hundreds of participating teams is still a remarkable result and highlights that Austrian cybersecurity talent is still highly competitive on a global scale.
Kuk Hofhackerei is a team consisting of university CTF teams and individuals from all over Austria. The foundation laid in 2018 was expanded in recent years by the growing influence of the Austrian Cyber Security Challenge, adding young hackers to the mix, which had not previously joined university-level CTF teams.
© Georg Merzdovnik