The CTF scene is dead
Key takeaways
- The scoreboard does not measure human skill cleanly anymore, and the old game is not coming back.
- I started playing CTFs in 2021, the same year I started university.
- I am saying it because CTFs were the thing that made me fall in love with security.
Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format. The scoreboard does not measure human skill cleanly anymore, and the old game is not coming back.
I started playing CTFs in 2021, the same year I started university. My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win Down Under CTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined The Hackers Crew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.
I am not saying this because I dislike CTFs. I am saying it because CTFs were the thing that made me fall in love with security. They taught me how to learn, gave me a way to measure myself, and introduced me to many of the people I respect most in the field. Watching people pretend the format is still fine is frustrating because the old game is not there anymore.