AUTOCRYPT Wins 1st Place DEF CON 34 Car Hacking | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #hacker

AUTOCRYPT, the South Korean automotive cybersecurity firm, has won the Car Hacking Village Capture the Flag competition at DEF CON 34, besting 83 teams from around the world in a contest widely regarded as the proving ground for real-world vehicle hacking talent. The company’s Red Team became the first in the event’s history to complete every challenge on the roster, finishing in 25 hours against a 50-hour window, according to the firm and multiple industry outlets that covered the win.

The competition ran August 7 through 9 in Las Vegas as part of DEF CON 34, one of the world’s largest and longest-running hacking conferences. The Car Hacking Village has staged its CTF since 2015, and this year’s field asked competitors to move fluidly between the abstract and the physical: identifying attack vectors, chasing down vulnerabilities, and breaking cryptographic protections across testbeds built around electronic control units, embedded controller boards, and full production vehicle architectures.

A Second Title After a Near Miss

For AUTOCRYPT, the victory closes a loop that opened in 2022, the year the company first entered the competition and took the top prize. Last year’s team finished third, a result that by AUTOCRYPT’s own account sharpened its preparation for this summer’s return. Finishing the entire challenge set in half the allotted time was enough to distinguish the team from the rest of the 83-team field, a number that underscores how competitive and how global the car-hacking discipline has become since the Village’s founding.

Humans and AI Agents Working the Same Bench

What set this year’s run apart, according to AUTOCRYPT, was not just speed but method. The Red Team paired its human security researchers with the company’s proprietary AI-powered security analysis platform, deploying multiple autonomous agents to comb through firmware and probe target subsystems at the same time. The AI agents handled the volume work, surfacing potential vulnerabilities and mapping attack vectors in parallel, while the human researchers reviewed those findings and made the calls on what to pursue next.

Duksoo Kim, AUTOCRYPT’s cofounder and chief executive, framed the win as validation of that hybrid approach. Winning the Car Hacking Village CTF, he said in a statement, reflects the company’s cybersecurity expertise and its hands-on experience across cryptography and vehicle environments. Kim added that as autonomous AI agents become a bigger part of the cybersecurity landscape generally, the result shows how AI-driven analysis and human judgment can be combined effectively, a pairing he called central to navigating today’s threat environment.

That framing tracks with a broader shift visible across DEF CON 34’s other automotive- and hardware-adjacent contests this year, where autonomous agents moved from side attraction to standard equipment in competitors’ toolkits, according to coverage of the conference’s opening events.

From Contest Floor to Commercial Service

AUTOCRYPT has said it intends to fold the human-AI red teaming workflow it used in Las Vegas directly into its commercial offerings, applying the same paired methodology to the automotive penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and vehicle type-approval validation work it performs for clients. The company describes itself as a provider of what it calls Physical AI security solutions, covering autonomous and connected vehicles, EV charging infrastructure, robotics, defense systems, and bio-healthcare devices, and notes it is the only designated automotive cybersecurity Technical Service provider in the Asia-Pacific region, a status that lets it support automakers and suppliers through vehicle development and into post-production.

Why the Win Matters Beyond the Trophy

The Car Hacking Village CTF has functioned for a decade as an informal benchmark for the automotive cybersecurity field, translating theoretical vulnerabilities in vehicle networks into contest challenges that researchers can actually attempt against live hardware. A clean sweep of the challenge set, done faster than any previous team has managed, gives AUTOCRYPT a credible marketing point at a moment when automakers and regulators are leaning harder on third-party validation of vehicle cybersecurity before granting type approval. It also offers an early, concrete data point in the debate over how much of vulnerability research can be handed to autonomous agents versus how much still depends on a human researcher deciding what to do with what the machines find.