11-22, 17:10–18:10 (Europe/Vienna), Track 1
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.
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.
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.
I am a master’s student at TU Wien specializing in cybersecurity. I enjoy playing CTFs and learning through hands-on challenges in web exploitation, cryptography, reverse engineering, and forensics. My interests include secure system design, vulnerability research, and cloud computing.