The C4T BuT S4D team from Russia has won the finals of the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit (SAS) Capture the Flag (CTF) competition, which this year brought more than 10 teams of both professional CTF players as well as participants from corporate and academic fields. A US$18,000 prize pool was awarded to the winning teams during the finals, held as part of Kaspersky’s SAS 2025 in Khao Lak, Thailand, on October 25-26.
Focused on skills development and building cyber capacities, the SAS CTF 2025 finals welcomed the winners of two competitions - the SAS CTF online qualifiers and the Kaspersky{CTF} regional finals, held earlier this year. The two CTFs attracted more than 2,500 teams, with 13 winners from Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
The SAS CTF 2025 finals were sponsored by Kaspersky Academy and OtterSec, a group of independent security researchers. The competitions were held in a dynamic attack-defense format in which teams simultaneously defended their infrastructure while probing and exploiting those of the other teams. Each team started with identical servers containing vulnerable services, and the goal was to find vulnerabilities, patch them on their own server, and exploit the same vulnerabilities on the competitors' servers. The team’s score was multiplied by their Service Level Agreement (SLA), reflecting the time their service remained operational and fully functional.
The grand prize was shared among the winning teams, with the C4T BuT S4D team in first place receiving $10,000, and the runner-up teams, SKSD (Indonesia) and dtl (Russia), receiving $5,000 and $3,000 respectively for second and third places.
"From an organizational point of view, the competition was excellent. We faced a lot of worthy opponents this year and saw new ideas for ourselves, despite the extensive experience of participation in such kind of events. We will definitely participate next year, if we get such an opportunity," commented Artem Mikheev from the C4T BuT S4D team, the winners of SAS CTF 2025.
“We are happy to congratulate the winners and all the participants of the SAS CTF 2025. This year's Capture the Flag competitions have been truly special as besides professional CTF players, we welcomed participants from business and academic community. In the cyberworld, cooperation is our strongest defense, and we’re keen to continue developing collaborative initiatives to foster cybersecurity culture globally,” says Igor Kuznetsov, Director of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT).
In addition to the competition, the finalists attended SAS 2025 as full participants, gaining access to cutting-edge talks and networking opportunities with cybersecurity leaders. Established in 2009, SAS is considered one of the most anticipated events for security experts and researchers, and each year the event revolves around a certain cybersecurity topic. This year’s SAS agenda has put a spotlight on the fast-evolving field of automotive security, reflecting its critical role in our interconnected world.
To learn more about the Security Analyst Summit 2025 please visit the official website.
