Manuel Reinsperger
Manuel is a pentester, programmer and researcher for how bad those darn AI systems actually are by now. He is also part of the KuK Hofhackerei and has made sure that everybody got to this year's DefCon and back home safely.
Sessions
DEF CON CTF is equal parts research sprint, incident response drill, and controlled chaos. In this talk, we recount how the Austrian team KuK Hofhackerei navigated the road from online qualifiers to the Las Vegas finals and what the journey taught us about building high-performance security teams. We’ll demystify the game formats (attack-defense, king of the hill, livectf), show how we structured roles and handoffs under pressure (triage, exploit, patch, ops), and share the infrastructure that kept us moving. Beyond the technicals, we cover comms discipline, fatigue management, and how to turn failures into momentum mid-game.
A lot of companies are bragging with their "AI enabled Security Testing Solutions", and a lot of them are not very good. Learn how you can build your own that is less bad, more fun and best of all, understand what is actually possible at the moment and what most definitely is not (no matter what certain marketing departments claim).