>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.

Well, I had to google what CTF means (capture the flag, a hacking competition), so surely cannot judge here, but the text indicates that with AI some things are very different today:

"That makes open CTFs pay-to-win. The more tokens you can throw at a competition, the faster you can burn down the board. Specialised cybersecurity models like alias1 by Alias Robotics are becoming less relevant compared to general frontier LLMs. The competition is turning into "who can afford to run enough agents, with enough context, for long enough.""

	▲	walletdrainer 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are two different schools of thought: 1) It’s OK to do just about anything to win a CTF, including installing malware on the organisers computers months before the actual event so you’ll have an easy time stealing the flags. 2) It’s not ok to try and win the CTF with a solution the authors did not intend. Recently the #2 crowd has been winning because the hacking scene has turned corporate and boring. People started to partake in CTFs in the hopes of landing a job(!) CTFs are indeed ruined for those people, I personally don’t mind. For the people in group #1 LLMs change little. Attacking the challenges directly was always a last resort.
	▲	mock-possum 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn’t that the bitter lesson in a nutshell? “Specialised cybersecurity models … are becoming less relevant compared to general frontier LLMs.”

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Retr0id an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I started playing in 2015 or so and had mostly stopped by 2020. Not because I felt it was "dead" exactly but it just wasn't hitting the same for me. By then it wasn't "the winner has the most LLMs", but "the winner has the most members on their team". I merged into one of the mega-teams and it just wasn't fun any more.

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Grimburger 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Learning about eternal September in May 2026

Hits different doesn't it

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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