>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.

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

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.

It's an incredibly exciting time in security research in my humble old man opinion. Think it's a shame if others can't see that.

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 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.