Here are the results from DEF CON Contests That Have been submitted so far. We're still gathering results so stay tuned for more. Contests marked with an asterisk * were Black Badge contests this year!
Contact neil@defcon.org with updates!
Badge Challenge
Winners: Team Green Corn Moon (Write-up here)
CyFi, Cybersaiyan84, Takvv, Unkafunka, Jacob B, Rhiann, Tommy, Leeps, Obfusec, B0tn3t, and traveler
Scav Hunt*
1st: breaking through - 236 points
2nd: OnlyFeet - 234 points
3rd: Sponge Bob Jrs - 201 points
Car Hacking Village CTF
1st place winner: OBD2_Obl1teratOrs
Phish Stories
Ruler: Tr1ster0
Wizard: Elijah Samuels
Jester: MarineMadMax
Band Camp: Hacker My Music!
Winner is SpouseMouse. Prize is an A1 Mini Combo with AMS.
Hac-Man*
Top Ten winners are:
1st Claudus 6796 <--- BLACK BADGE
2nd V4ngu4rd 6498
3rd Eagal_Eater 6473
4th silver_anth 6334
5th omaru 6187
6th Panders 6156
7th yingshuo 5948
8th G4nd4lf 5682
9th Zoltar92 5611
10th Ch33kyN4L4 5383
We were asked for some of the more interesting challenges that the 1st Place player solved, so while they solved WAY more than this, here are a few of the more interesting ones that they solved:
In Print challenges - A group of cipher challenges requiring hardcopy print publications. Claudus enjoyed the crossword puzzle cipher from the local daily newspaper.
Steganography challenges - A group of challenges where data is hidden in other data like images. Claudus specifically enjoyed the stereogram challenge.
Ciphers challenges - A group of challenges involving various ciphers. One required you to collect chunks of a codebook from the other cipher challenges.
Final Puzzle - Collect physical cipher disks and coordinates from other challenges in the game, use them to collect riddle words and determine what the answer is.
TeleChallenge
First place: FoxBox Dialing Services - they stayed up all night because our countermeasures against their automation were effective. They won through sheer perseverance and probably near lethal amounts of caffeine.
Second Place: Mighty Mighty Dial Tone - completed the whole game, just two hours behind FoxBox.
Third place: CyBirds
Red Team Village CTF*
CTF Details
Name: Red Team CTF
Style: Jeopardy CTF for Teams
Challenges: Web, Crypto, Artificial Intelligence, Reversing, Binary Exploitation, and Forensics.
Duration: August 8, 11 am - August 10, 12 PM
CTF Short Leaderboard:
1. NUSeXcel
2. Pentraze
3. EPT
CTF Metrics
Total Participants: 372
Total Teams: 176
Total Challenges: 40
CTF Winners
Team NUSeXcel won the CTF by ranking highest on the leaderboard.
Red Alert ICS CTF
Team Standing :
1. breezeway 3550 Points
2. BreadAlert 3200 Points
3. limes 1150 Points
Total Number of Teams : 73
Call Center Village
Winner: Excenter
Full Leaderboard
A 4-way tie was broken by the first to complete the 10 challenges.
The capstone challenge, The Live Operator, was not beaten! (So they are the real winners in my book.)
Malware Village
BOMBE(Battle of Malware Bypass & EDR)
Winners: dsgallups, Nightsedge, and Someuser
EMYAC (Extensive Malware Yara Accuracy Competition)
Winners: BallerShotCaller, sheldon73, codeninja2
MARC I (Malware Analysis Report Competition - 1)
Winner: Amolivella
YEP-HAVOC (Yeet All Prompts at the Helpline for All Victims Of Cybercrime)
No winners, LLM was not breached
Pinball Challenge (CTF)*
Winner was Team Celtic! The two team members Polybius, and Redfred worked through the flags and completed the challenge in 29.5 hours! We will publish detailed statistics and other information on pinballhackers.com after DEFCON!
PhreakMe*
presented by HackedExistence
684 Payphone Calls - $170
4560 Calls to the contest
5244 Total Calls
39 Teams Logged on to the BBS
4 Teams got a million dollars in our Door game Badge life
Blue Team Village CTF (Project Obsidian)
Here are the stats from the Blue Team Village CTF (Project Obsidian):
Total Users (Aug 8-9): 393 (94.8% of all registrations)
Total Teams (Aug 8-9): 229 (95.4% of all teams)
🏅 WINNERS:
1st Place: GhidraGoons (39,057 points)
almanac-problem: 12,806 points
So1ArF1Ar3: 9,450 points
null: 9,501 points
BorrowedMilk: 7,300 points
2nd Place: 0x325 (30,957 points)
3rd Place: SISC (30,952 points)
Darknet-ng*
To find out more check out Darknet-ng.network
1st Place CyberMonk3y
2nd Place Bruhaha
3rd Place m0rn19h3r0
Beverage Chilling 2025, our 20th anniversary
This year we had 24 teams complete 53 beer chilling entries over our two days of contest. The mean time taken to chill a our provided 100-degree beer was 229 seconds, with a mean effective cooling power of 619W.
In third place, Team Pipelord and BOB chilled a beer in 92 seconds, with an effective cooling power of 880W.
In second place, team Eutectic Point chilled their beer in 50 seconds, with an effective cooling power of 1200W.
And in first place, team Cup O Pennies chilled their beer in 15 seconds, with an effective cooling power of 3100W.
Fox Hunt
1st: Viswar
2nd: Mutual inductance and Slim
REALI7Y OVERRUN
REALI7Y OVERRUN leaderboard final
GOLD BUG*
Official closing scoreboard:
Congratulations to SHAGWORM for completing all puzzles plus the meta and winning the Gold Bug Contest!
Stats:
This year's theme: Treasure Seeker's Spoils
14 puzzles including 1 meta puzzle
225 Teams registered
75 Teams with points scored
1845 total answers submitted
206 correct answers submitted
Puzzle with most incorrect submissions: Blue Gold
Puzzle with most correct submissions: The Key to the Garden Adventure (Jr. Crypto Puzzle)
Team with the least sleep: ???
RFV CTF
We had 37 teams and over 100 challenges across WiFi, Bluetooth,
Infrared, and Software Defined Radio.
Cloud Village CTF
This year, we built our whole CTF around a story: defending the village from a cyber attacker we named H3X.N0V4. It was all about practical defense, forensics, and hunting down those tricky cloud misconfigurations that people see in the real world, with challenges spread across GitHub, AWS, Azure, and GCP. We also brought our first physical challenge combining cloud-hosted services and IOT devices.
Honestly, the best part for us was the vibe. A huge goal was to create something where new folks could jump in without feeling intimidated, and the community really delivered. It was incredible to see experienced players actively helping beginners work through problems. That collaborative spirit is exactly what we were hoping for. We enjoyed having a full house with plenty more players online as well.
Finally, to make sure everyone got something out of it, we wrapped everything up with a big group walk-through at the end. We broke down some of the more complex challenges and showed how H3X.N0V4's attacks worked so people left with new skills they could actually use, not just a final score.
It was a fantastic experience for our whole team, and we're so proud of what the community built and learned together. Here are some statistics to share our reach into our community:
- Total Registered Players: 530 ( +156 from previous year)
- Total Registered Teams: 305 ( +90 from previous year)
- Total Points Achievable: 19880
- Total Submissions: 1715
- Most Solves: Spectre Heist
- Least Solves: Cloud Walker part I and II
Winning Teams
1 - GMO Ierae (Japan): 19880
2 - murphy's Law (US): 17880
3 - securisec (US): 15990
Thanks again for everything,
The Cloud Village CTF Ops Team
Recon Village Contests
We're excited to share the results from the two contests we hosted this year: Live Recon and GEOSINT. Both were found challenging by the participants as they struggled for 27+ hours.
Live Recon:
Live Recon was 27 hours of hybrid (online + offline) OSINT on multiple real-world target companies and Live Reconnaissance.
Total participants: 47 teams with 67 participants.
367 Web logins impacted by infostealers and the Dark Web
14500+ lines of unique raw data points(subdomains, IP, emails, URL's, github accounts, linkedin profiles)
1st Prize Winner: pdteam
2nd Prize Winners: pinja
3rd Prize Winners: KaalChakra
_________________________________________________________________
GEOSINT:
Players were dropped into random Street View locations and raced to pinpoint their spot using only visual clues - a fast, fun way to showcase Geo-OSINT skills and prove that sharp eyes can take you anywhere in the world.
Total participants: 232 Players
Semi Finals: 40 Players
Finals: 20 Players
Winners
1st Prize Winners – zilla – 23500 / 25000
2nd Prize Winners – Robert Gamer – 22454 / 25000
Dungeons at Defcon*
Winner was stargazers
Hacker Runway
People's Choice Winner - Alysa's Rogue's Yellow Shirt (Cyberpunk 2077) @squirrel_625 (IG)
Smart Wear - Marbasec's HatGPT
Digital Wear - Reed's The Lilliputian Locomotive Lid
Aesthetics - 2 way tie: Hunny's The Hacker Manifesto Sexy Chain Harness @thatgirlhunny and Andy's Reversible Plaid Rainbow Skirt @Integgroll.
Other Participants and honorable mentions
Kindred Fiori - Sailor flamingo @kindredfiori
Kacie - Patchwork Pond @varied_heart(IG)
Quinn - Data Visualization with textiles: chat log with my girlfriend, where I sleep, ex-communication @quinnanya.me (bsky)
LaHootHoot - Wasteland Punk Kubernetes Edition LaHootHoot @gbongiorno4 (IG)
Mementomechanica - Modular Hacker Jacket @Mementomechanica
Zephyr - Fascinating Fascinator