ZeroHour

Search: “Hack The Box”

14 stories

The best human hacking team still out-solved the best AI team

Hack The Box 2026 benchmark data shows AI agents helped top teams but human-only teams still solved everything while best AI teams stalled at 32 of 36 challenges.

At the 2026 Global Cyber Skills Benchmark (Project Nightfall) run by Hack The Box, 93 designated AI agent accounts across 54 teams held 2.7% of registered accounts but produced 4.2% of submitted flags and 4.6% of awarded points, and appeared in 17 of the Top 25 finishers. Median solve time dropped from 26 hours in 2024 to 13.8 hours in 2026, though the data cannot attribute the change to AI. At the November 2025 NeuroGrid CTF, AI-augmented teams solved challenges 3.2x faster overall but only 1.69x among the Top 5%, and the only team to complete all 36 challenges was human, while the best AI team stopped at 32.

Help Net Security · 20d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News · 23d agoResearch1

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2