Romanian Ethical Hacking Team PwnThyBytes Wins International Competition

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cybersecurity leader, announced the winners of its long-running Capture the Flag Competition, which squared off in a virtual final this week. This year’s final event saw 12 teams from 14 countries competing in a series of challenges related to critical issues in cybersecurity.

The global Capture the Flag is one of Trend Micro’s most popular industry initiatives, designed to help tackle skill shortages by finding and nurturing the talent of tomorrow. The search is particularly critical in a world of rapidly evolving cyber-threats where supply chain attacks, IoT threats, AI tools, and more represent a growing risk to global organizations.

The sheer volatility of today’s threat landscape and the size of the modern corporate attack surface is pushing existing security practitioners to the limits. It’s made platform-based security a crucial enterprise strategy to help maximize protection and ROI. In this fast-moving world, organizations must ensure their IT security teams have the right skills for the job. The talented participants in this year’s Capture the Flag stand as a strong reassurance about the future.

Mike Gibson, vice president of customer success and security research for Trend Micro

Like the 2020 event, this year’s competition featured two virtual rounds: an online qualifier running over a 24-hour period and the finals event. Teams battled it out for the CTF crown on December 18-19 in a Dynamic Jeopardy competition.

Challenges were designed to address critical areas of cybersecurity including Reversing, Cloud, IoT, OSINT, Forensics, and Machine Learning.

The final results – Romanian Team PwnThyBytes wins

First Place: PwnThyBytes (Romania)

Second Place: Bad Guesser (China)

Third Place: CodeRed (Korea)

The winning team from the finals received ¥1,000,000 (approximately $9,000 USD). Each player from the winning team also received 15,000 Zero Day Initiative Rewards Program points towards exclusive awards and benefits. The winners will also be automatically seeded in the 2022 competition.

The second and third place teams received ¥300,000 and ¥200,000 ($2,600 USD and $1,800 USD respectively).

About Trend Micro
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro’s cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints. As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, the platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response. With 7,000 employees across 65 countries, Trend Micro enables organizations to simplify and secure their connected world.