Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea.

Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"

Thanks!

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence.

We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

I feel the post. For me AI has ruined both, playing CTFs and also building CTFs challenges. The most annoying thing to me is the "yeah idk but here is the flag" mentality.

Before when playing CTFs with my mates was usually sitting there for hours tackling a challenge until some other mate joined, had some look together and solved it with you together in 30 minutes which is the most rewarding learning experience. Nowadays mate joins in throws the clanker on it and solved it in 5 minntes. Asking on how it worked you always get the "yeah idk what it did, but who cares, here is the flag" response.

Same for creating challenges. Whenever I ask for writeups or if some people solved it differently I usually get the "yeah idk, clanker solved that one" response taking the fun out of it.

So yep, this CTF format is definitely dead. Mainly because the strong competitiveness and prices. This encourages people to cheese challenges and sometimes solving them differently was fine as you still had a creative out-of-the-box thinking moment, but nowadays with AI there is no brainpower needed, no cheesing needed, no human needed. As you mentioned, it's pay to win.

My two cents is that the 24/7 CTFs will get more attraction as the scoreboard doesn't matter there and simply doesn't give you any price.

I was writing an obfuscator recently, I just had the model deobfuscate and optimize the code back to original and I kept improving the obfuscator until it couldn't. The funny thing is that after all this I also ended up with a really strong deobfuscator and optimizer which is probably more capable than most commercial tools.

The solution is just to make CTFs harder, but when do CTFs become too hard? Maybe the problem is that 'hard' CTFs are fundementally too 'simple' where it's just a logic chain and an exhaustive bruteforce towards a solution since there really are limited ways to express a solution in plain sight.

Or maybe human creativity has been exhausted and we're not so limitless as we thought. Only time will tell.

I had another idea spring to mind: we could hide two flags, one that could only be found by ai agents and not humans or tools written by humans.

I have no experience in the CTF scene so I'm curious - why not lean in and design the puzzles with an AI harness like the one top teams use in the loop and use the(presumably) expert skills of the designers to patch up the holes until the AI can't find them? Do you just end up designing ~perfectly secure systems that no human can break without finding monetizable 0days?

Meta: this was submitted with the article’s title “The CTF scene is dead” which I found very easy to understand. It has just been updated to use the subtitle’s first sentence, “Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format”. I find that much harder to grasp, rather like a garden-path sentence. My immediate thoughts were that “Frontier” was a company name, and that there was some file format named CTF. If you don’t know about Capture The Flag contests, the change doesn’t help. If you do, I think the change makes it worse.

This is happening to other forms of competitive programming too. The most recent AIs have problem solving skills rivaling top humans, and so if AI can't be easily banned, the competition is dominated by AI agents.

I thought code golf would take longer for AIs because there's so little training data (it's more niche), but we're seeing AIs starting to match expert humans there too. Sucks because golf has been my favorite type of programming puzzle.

It's crazy how far AIs have come in problem solving ability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurit...

still has no mention of AI, but that will likely change as they increasingly dominate competition.

>The competition is turning into "who can afford to run enough agents, with enough context, for long enough."

This will basically become true for everything.

«That feedback loop is breaking. If the visible scoreboard is dominated by teams using AI, a beginner is pushed toward using AI before they have built the instincts the AI is replacing. That is an anti-pattern. It prevents active learning, and active struggle is the bit that actually teaches you. It is also completely demotivating to put in real effort and see no visible progress because the ladder above you has been automated.»

This stands out to me, and speaks perhaps broader than the article itself? I’m sure this has been in the spotlight before, but well put for many areas I think.

It's not only CTFs. I strongly believe being a programmer at a gamejam like Ludum Dare, or hackathons is pretty much over.

Competitive programming scene always included offline competition and with AI they are becoming more important (and in general they were more fair even before). If CTFs are to survive, they should probably try to adopt this strategy.

You could even go so far that anything loaded on your computer is fair game, but not more than that (certain competitive programming competition for example allow unlimited amount of paper material - for CTFs you probably need much more than that, therefore electronic).

I can't help but draw parallels with video games. Aimbots in competitive multiplayer games is a well defined issue: it's considered cheating and frowned upon, players caught cheating are banned from the game. Tool-assisted speedruns (TAS) where a player attempts a world record at completion in a single-player game is another face of the same concept (computers help you win), but one that is socially accepted as long as runs are clearly labelled as TAS.

A big fraction of the comments on this thread are about the impact of cheating on competitive games. It's important to understand that automating CTF challenges isn't usually cheating. It's normally part of CTF culture. The better teams have toolboxes ready to shred the early challenges; it's not a level playing field and was never intended to be.

(The author of the piece understands this; I think they're broadly right, though I think these games will find other ways to incentivize participation without the now-meaningless leaderboards.)

I don't do CTF's but took part at the security workshop for fun ~2 years with my Android phone only. I was first with the first simple challenge, but then couldnt continue because my phone was just too limited. But I watched what the others did. And a young Indian guy did everything with ChatGPT then. I found it silly, but amusing, because he actually got second. There was no Codex nor Claude then. Nowadays it must be dead for real, because I would solve everything with my agents, as I do in the real world.

I don’t think CTFs are dead, they’ll just evolve. The difficulty level will need to be increased or the rules locked down. Just like sports and racing persist despite the existence of performance enhancing drugs and rocket technology.

I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges.

But yes, it was significantly easier now than I last attempted one. Even manually solving with AI assisted assembly interpretation was much easier.

I have normally found any sort of timed technical competition intimidating. Even so, about 6 or 7 years ago, after being persuaded by a colleague, I participated in a few CTFs. I am glad I did, back when this type of thing still meant something. I have kept a screenshot from one of the CTFs that I am quite fond of: https://susam.net/files/blog/ctf-2019.png

Interesting and well written article that mirrors/foreshadows how LLMs do and will change other scenes.

As I don't know much about the CTF scene, I looked for other takes on this topic.

Here's an article from 2015 about how tool-assistance already changed CTFs:

> Individual skill will undoubtedly be a factor next year. But, I'm left wondering whether next year's DEFCON CTF will tell us anything more than how well-developed each team's tools are (and how well they can interpret the results).

https://fuzyll.com/2015/ctf-is-dead-long-live-ctf/

But there are quite a few recent (2026) articles with the same core message as in the original article, e.g., https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/04/ctfs-in-the-ai-era/ or https://k3ng.xyz/blog/ctf-is-dead

And here's someone explaining how Claude Max allowed them to win CTFs:

> I had always been interested in CTF as one of the only ways people could compete and show off their skill in coding/problem solving on a global scale. It was just too difficult and didn't make sense for me to learn the fundamentals as an electrical engineer. As time went on, I got better and better, and it was hard to tell whether it was because of experience or if it was because of improvements in AI.

> I accomplished my goals, and for that reason I'm quitting CTF, at least for now. [...] I'd like to think I highlighted the problem before it became a bigger issue. So, how do we fix this? Teams and challenge authors losing motivation is not good. CTF dying is not good. AI bad. Or is it?

https://blog.krauq.com/post/ctf-is-dying-because-of-ai

The only article that saw LLMs as a non-negative force for CTFs was this one. Fittingly, it sounds like LLM output ("Let's be honest", "This is where things get interesting.") and only contains hallucinated references.

https://caverav.cl/posts/ctfs-not-dead/ctfs-not-dead/

When I did my first CTF, it was close to the deadline and I thought I had the extracted the flag from the program and the rest of the program was just filler, so I entered the flag, and it told me it was not the flag. It turns out the program multiplies the input by a pseudorandom matrix before comparing it against the flag, so I had to implement a matrix inversion and then get the flag. That's not the story though.

The matrix was always the same and the challenge was clearly designed so that the point was being able to read anything at all, not knowing how to invert a matrix, so I asked the creator what was up.

He told me that there were tools that would trace input values until they reached a comparison instruction, then print what they were compared against. Therefore it was necessary for every deobfuscation challenge to scramble the input in some way too complex for these tools to undo, before comparing it. Hence the multiplication by a pseudorandom matrix.

The point is, cheating tools aren't new.

The "CTF for fun" aspect has been dead ever since the winning teams had thousands of dollars of rewards waiting for them. Of course people are going to use anything that's not explicitly forbidden by the rules to win. Introducing what amounts to an "I win" button that both can't be prevented by rules and is accessible to anyone didn't "break the format" anymore than the epidemic of giant merger teams did a couple years ago, it just broke the community because you now don't have to actually talk to other people to cheat anymore.

Many CTFs have switched to a dual-leaderboard format recently, one for "agentic teams," one for the rest. If all you care about is "learning" and imaginary internet points, you can just participate as a human team and adblock the AI scoreboard, and maybe lobby CTFTime into splitting their rankings as well.

You could make it offline and with provided laptops only, just like with the competitive CS2 scene.

The first paragraph on anything with an acronym in it should explain the bloody acronym. I assumed CTF was an encryption standard, given the headline. It was only coming here and reading the comments that made me realise it's a game-format ("Capture The Flag").

What is CTF? And why is the cyber security world filled with silly gaming references?

There's something funny about complaining about cheating in a hacking competition.

Well actually I get it. In cycling motor doping, putting a hidden engine into the bike, seems more offensive than regular doping. I think this is because there is a continuum from eating well to taking supplements to injecting stuff, but having a engine breaks a fundamental idea about cycling. Similar hacking is about cleverly abusing the rules.

It's tough. We run botsbench.com , which tracks AI progress on a top CTF, and I gave a talk at CCC a few months ago on our own results doing AI speed runs, so I think about this a lot.

In our own trainings we give (AI agents for security, and a graph masterclass), we ended up leaning into it. For example, we ship with a skills bundle. There are plus sides, like less code-forward participants can go further and are appreciating that, and less of a gap between high-level concepts and successful hands-on. But at the same time, manual work does build a lot of intuition & knowledge that gets missed in auto modes.

>If adaptation means accepting that the scoreboard is now an AI orchestration benchmark, then we should say that honestly instead of pretending the old competition still exists.

This is like someone complaining that making machine parts has been ruined: Skillful craftsmen used to make them by hand using manual tools!

Nowadays the CAD/CAM/CNC cheaters have almost completely automated the whole thing. How is the next generation of craftsmen going to learn how to craft a gear by hand when the process of gear making has been reduced to pressing start on a CNC machine?!

See what I mean? Sorry, I think this article is just Luddite. I can empathize with the pain of your beloved craft basically being rendered obsolete by new technology, but the process can neither be stopped nor is it bad in general.

The manual skills you trained with CTF puzzles are now simply no longer relevant . (Field-specific) "AI orchestration" is the new cyber securtiy skill if LLMs really have become so good at this, and what the author used to do manually then has the same value as being able to craft a gear by hand.

Is AI also superior to humans at black box challenges and attacking actual targets on the internet? That seems like a really important question.

I guess this is very similar to what happened to demo scene, in some way. The limits are what makes these problems interesting, and once we have better machines / tools, the incredible skill is no longer prerequisite, making everything less interesting for participants. Sad, but - such is life...

I think soon there will be ways to trick this models and I think when it happens it will be yet another layer like aslr

These models seems completely unbeatable only in the ads. There are 100+ times way someone puts Hindi Yoda talk In Morse Code and it goes nuts. The reason they are going to hard for PR Marketing on this is because they know it is a matter of time.

CTF = Capture The Flag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurit...

Great article, well written, and good analogy to chess. I’ve been playing competitive chess most of my adult life and I think that the solution lies in how chess dealt with this problem:

Explicit ELO measurements with some cheating detection. AI assistance wholly banned. As you climb the ELO ladder, detection gets more onerous. At top level during online events, anti cheating teams require the use of both monitoring software and multiple cameras.

Idea is that you can cheat pretty easily at the lowest levels but it gets less easy the higher you go. This allows for better feeding into the truly elite competitions.

I think chess’s very firm stance that AI is never allowed in competition (neither online nor in person), rather than CTF’s acceptance, was the right call.

You can still do competitions. But you'll all need to fly to the same place and work on laptops with a fresh install of Linux. 1 hour to install tooling then Internet off, challenge revealed.

Not as easy logistically...

Yes you're right - But just like many other stuff things change - CTF Veteran for more than 3 decades I find lots of fun figuring out how to use some of my agents and new tools to find vulnerabilities - The goal is the same / tools change and that's good.

,,a beginner is pushed toward using AI before they have built the instincts the AI is replacing. That is an anti-pattern.''

The same article talks about CTF skills as a way to learn about security best practices and separately a sport.

In reality it was all about learning an extremely important skillset (securing/attacking software and systems) that is getting automated.

The real thing the author seems to be frustrated about is AGI is coming in computationally verifiable domains first, and lot of his skillset was taken over in a big part.

easy, CTFs should ban it. then it'd be more like the chess community

This left a strange feeling. The article reads as extremely bleak. But from a different perspective this is extremely bullish for AI.

Question: Was this website made with Claude?

I've seen that exact font and color scheme a dozen of times the past weeks.

“solve”, why not solution? Like “spend” and not expenditure, why use the verb as a noun and not care about grammar?

Do CTFs like Lan parties or factor in new tooling avalable to people. change is not death. or death is not an end. either way, people will enjoy applying and showing off their skill. competing with eachother on a human level,.with or without ai tools.

I'm conflicted on the use of AI in CTFs. On the one hand, they are supposed to mirror real-life scenarios, so of course you should be able to use any tool that would be available to you in real life.

On the other hand, CTFs are fundamentally a game and a competition which are supposed to be fun and compare and improve ones skill. So when I let an LLM generate the entire solution for me, what's the point anymore? I did not learn anything. I did not work for that place on the leaderboard, I just copied the solution. And worst of all, I did not have any fun. It's boring.

So how does using AI as a solver not feel like cheating?

I’m interested in finding out how attack-defense style CTFs are affected by slopping. ENOWARS skorbor will probably significantly differ from the last time around.

Chess and Go are not dead just because Ai got better than humans at these games.

What am I missing here?

We’re in an age where, to be possibly a bit rude but blunt, pseudo-intellectuals are obsolete. A pseudo-intellectual prided themselves on being able to efficiently solve closed, man made problems such as leetcode, CTF problems, or even math Olympiad problems. They could do good in school by memorizing a rote technique and applying it to some test. They typically don’t have any real creativity and if you put them to work on a problem you can’t Google or isn’t a fake man made one, they fall apart incredibly fast.

They may as well be the human equivalent to what LLMs currently are.

I do not mourn these people, as they’re usually the most arrogant types. I hope for their sake they adapt.

I thought a company called Frontier broke a file format CTF.

AI-generated phishing is the scariest development in cybersecurity right now. Click rates on AI-written phishing emails are 54% compared to 12% for traditional attacks. Automated real-time detection is the only scalable answer at this point

Unable to find what “CTF” means, since it doesnt look like referring to Capture The Flag gaming

Neither the article nor the comments in this thread explain which of the many meanings the acronym CTF is being applied to...

Very impressed that OP has gone from starting university in 2021 to becoming a Senior Security Engineer.

It's an incredibly exciting time in security research in my humble old man opinion.

Think the cadence of new exploits is perhaps a good measure of that rather than subjective thoughts by anyone regardless of experience.

My first ever was Stripe CTF in 2012 I think, I still wear the shirt I got (now super fainted) from passing some challenges. I was a student in portugal and remember receiving the shirt for it and thinking, maybe those Americans aren't any better than me and I can compete at the same level.

I never got super into security but it gave me the confidence to play in the same field and lose the stupid aura I had that somehow "rich americans" would be better than me at everything because they had better universities or because of Hollywood or something.

Sad that another cool thing is lost to AI but I guess kids will learn in other ways.

How to motivate cybersec best outcome reddit 2026 no mythos

>Imagine giving every competitive chess player the best chess engine and letting them use it freely during matches. Would that be considered fair?

Imagine every competitive chess player being allowed to video call with a hundred other people to help them make a move. CTF have never been fair, nor has it ever been effectively structured for learning.

used to see some really good CTF videos show up on youtube and now nothing like that shows up on the feed

Pretty ironic that this article was also written using LLMs. It has all the LLM-isms.

You can introduce canaries, and ban auto-pwning in general. that's usually banned anyways. Some challenges just can't be solved by a human in under a certain period of time.

Another idea is deep red herrings. solves that lead to more solves, on and on, except only if the previous solves were solved quickly. The effect will be that participants who solve things quickly will keep finding things to solve. they can't know that the path they're on will lead to victory, even if they artificially slow down, unless they consistently slow down just as a human would. It will eliminate the speed advantage. For the skill advantage, other than having another LLM procedurally generate challenges, I don't know of a good solution.

There are always things like captchas. or the good 'ol honor system. A person can spend only so much for things that have no financial reward in the end, only clout.

---

Alright, all that said, i think i really do have a good solution for this, as well as academic exams. Or I think I do, because it's so simple, I've been scratching my head as to why everyone isn't doing it already.

Require screen sharing/recording. LLMs can't fake that well enough. Have another LLM audit the video for mouse, key stroke, window movement and other details to see if it looks human-generated or not.

If a student has an essay assignment, have them record their screen as they research, and actually type out the whole thing. In the extreme, require anti-cheat proctoring software installed, as is done in remote examination. In an even more high-stakes and extreme scenario, have them share their face. Their eye and face movement, correlated with the screen-share, and correlated with the activity observed on the server end, should be pretty hard to beat, even in the next ~5 years of LLM advances.

>I started playing CTFs in 2021

>and the old game is not coming back

For many people the CTF scene was already dead in 2021 because it had turned into something unrecognisable.

In reality it’s just different.

I helped arrange my country's longest living CTF this year. Our CTF is *made for amateurs*, but we always have challenges for intermediate to skilled players and the top of the scoreboard is usually topped by them. It is the compromise we have - amateurs get so many tasks they struggle to solve them all, and the pro's get to win. Our goal is to nerdsnipe people who are curious into trying our CTF by offering easy beginner tasks, and then get them hooked enough to stick around for the intermediate ones, even if it takes them a day to solve one.

This year, multiple groups on the top of the leaderboard were clearly abusing LLMs. You can tell because they know nothing of what a CTF is nor the terminology, nor really the fields the challenges were about when they were talked to. They were obviously amateurs.

It was pretty depressing to hear how unaware they were of how obviously they did not fit in to the type that usually is on the top of the leaderboard. It seems they seriously think they were under the radar. If it was one group it could be a freak incident - some times someone just shows up and curbstomps competition. But there were many groups like this this year. They also had a certain smugness to it - one staff reported that a group was hinting to other teams about their "super weapon". Another group credited their "secret third team member they didn't want to talk about".

I use LLM frequently and experiment with it a lot, both at work and on my free time. Nowadays they are good enough to have value and I am interested in learning more about that. They let me spend more time on hard problems and avoid spending the day on simple CRUD. I say this to say that LLM doesnt have to equal bad, it is a tool, that's all. However, I generally avoid LLM communities because many LLM fans are lazy and unskilled people who are just happy they can feel they are worth something even if they have no skill. They don't really have much to provide of conversation. If anything, from reading the CTF crowd this year, the rise of LLMs has just meant more of these people can stomp on and harvest the CTF scene for self validation.

This is not me trying to gatekeep who can play CTF. Anyone is welcome, but there is one condition: You are here to learn and have fun.

The conclusion many I talk to has come to is that nowadays, it is harder to learn to put in hard work and become good at something because there are just too many ways to cheat and take shortcuts. I suspect in the future there will be a shortage of useful people - the kind that have critical thought and know the value of doing something properly. This doesn't mean "Not using LLM", but as said by many on HN before you need a certain seniority before LLMs are useful augmentations to your skills and not just stopping you from learning yourself.

I agree with the article. Anything but physical competitions with strong security - think professional e-sports with organizer-provided PCs, is over. But I think one of the most interesting things to take away from my CTF experience is that the bottom of the leaderboard was still full of amateurs slowly working their way up - it is a few rotten apples that ruin the fun for most, and there are still plenty of people who want to learn and deep-dive.

No relationship with the CTF (Common Trace Format) format ..

Unrelated, but does anyone find this site incredibly hard to read?

Right, the same way that car racing has "broken" jogging. This is so dumb. /s

The whole point of competitions is to provide a safe environment thanks to a set of rules all participants AGREE on in order to progress together.

If new tools "break" the competition, we change the rules and that's A-OK.

CTF isn't a natural phenomenon, if tools change, rules change, simple.

tldr; adapters took my elo

The article is the thickest of AI slop. Don't believe anything.

Don't hate me, I do agree with the premise of the article (I really do!) but I can’t help but notice:

>The issue was never that AI could help. proceeds to write the next 3 sentences about how the problem IS in fact ai help

>Teams that refused to use AI were not just missing a convenience; they were playing a slower version of the competition.

>CTFs were not just a set of puzzles. They were a ladder.

>The claim is not that every challenge is solved. The claim is that...

>The loss is not just a scoreboard. It is the ladder from

Guys I'm so sorry I just can't stop noticing stuff like this. Anyone else?