After their victory at Hack-A-Sat 2023, the mhackeroni ethical hacker team reached seventh place at DEF CON Quals 2024, winning the chance to participate in the finals to be held in Las Vegas from 8 to 11 August.

The team, composed mainly of students from the Politecnico di Milano, includes several Italian universities including the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', the University of Venice, the University of Padua and the University of Genoa.

The team is captained by Mario Polino and is supported by several researchers and professors from the universities involved, including Prof. Stefano Zanero from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, where Polino was a researcher until recently.

DEF CON is the most important cyber security competition in the world. It is a Capture the Flag competition divided into individual challenges, each presenting a feature with vulnerabilities that must be exploited by the participating teams to obtain the 'flag', usually confidential information represented by a simple text.

Each challenge has a score, which represents its difficulty, and the team that obtains the most points is crowned as the winner. In some challenges, the flag has to be obtained from a web service, in other cases it is located in the filesystem of an operating system and its recovery requires hacking the applications installed on it, other times the flags are protected by a cryptographic system, and so on.