80% of Korean teams advanced to the final round of junior teams in the last three years
The main competition at COEX from July 23 to 24
The KAIST AI hacker also participated in the final round for the first time
The preliminary round of “Codegate 2026,” one of the world’s top three international hacking defense competitions, has ended. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), 3,333 white hackers from 88 countries around the world flocked, the largest in the last three years.
The Codegate Security Forum announced on the 2nd that it has confirmed the finalists after the Codegate 2026 qualifying round held on the 28th of last month. A total of 3,333 people participated in the preliminary round, including 3,006 from 844 teams in the general division and 327 from the junior division. On the same day, the secretariat released a list of 40 teams that advanced to the finals on its official website.
Codegate is an event hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and organized by the Maeil Business Newspaper, the Codegate Security Forum, and the Korea Internet Promotion Agency (KISA), marking its 18th anniversary this year.
This competition is characterized by high-level questions that compress the actual security threat environment. It widely reflects the latest security issues such as internal analysis of hardware chips, checking vulnerabilities in virtualized environments, targeting loopholes in web browsers, and analyzing commercial software vulnerabilities. In particular, the issue of digging into the operating system (OS) kernel area and obtaining managerial authority was cited as the highest difficulty.
After 15 hours of competition, “RubiyaLab Expedition” ranked first in the general division. Last year’s winning team, Blue Water, automatically advances to the finals as the previous winning team. In the Junier division, Korean participants made up 80 percent of the finalists, showing a strong performance.
The level of participants has also increased due to the use of AI. The secretariat explained that the overall low point of the participants’ scores increased as the use of AI increased.
The finals will be held from July 23 to 24 at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul. During the finals, key lectures by security experts, conferences, and hacking experience programs for the general public will also be held. In particular, this year, “AI Hacker,” developed in collaboration with KAIST, will participate for the first time with a player qualification.
“As AI technology is used for both attack and defense, the paradigm of security is fundamentally changing,” said Cho Hyun-sook, chairman of the Codegate Security Forum. “This codegate will be a stage to show the direction of a new security competition where humans and AI coexist.”
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