Hacker-Team Sauercloud rocks DEF CON in Las Vegas!

Hackers unite! A mixed team with 6 hackers of the H-BRS as well as representatives of several other German universities suceeded at the DEF CON in Las Vegas. Team Sauercloud was the best German team and reached seventh place out of 16 qualified finalists in preliminaries worldwide. Well done!

Computer science students Konstantin Wurster, Aaron Kaiser, Markus Kranz, Manfred Paul, Jan-Niklas Sohn and Ruben Gonzalez regularly hack their way onto the podium in international competitions in the RedRocket and Red Button hacking teams.

Now the successful students have joined forces with hackers from other universities to compete in the premier class:

Together with hackers from Bochum University, Saarland University, TU Berlin, FAU Erlangen, Bonn University, Munich University of Applied Sciences, Stuttgart University and Koblenz University, they travelled to Las Vegas to take part in the Capture The Flag competition of DEF CON, which is regarded as the most renowned conference in the field of IT security and hacking. Previously, the team had already qualified for the final round with a 6th place in a selection tournament among more than 1000 participants.

The best 16 teams worldwide had to face various challenges in the final round, e.g. Game Hacking with Doom on a XBOX, an AI Challenge with bypassing a classifier, hacking a LISP machine and binary exploitation.

The winner was Plaid Parliament of Pwning, a team of students and alumni from Carnegie Mellon University, ahead of Team HITCon from Taiwan and Tea Deliverers from China.

The members of the Sauercloud team took part in the DEF CON for the first time with only a few exceptions and the team is happy about the 7th place as the best German team.

The prizes: DEF CON Black Badges (lifelong free entry to all DEF CON events) and DEF CON leather jackets as well as (quote from the organizer): "eternal glory"!