CTFs in the AI Era

The Include Security team attended the BSides 2026 CTF competition and observed how effective frontier models have become at solving a variety of CTF challenges. Our team gives a first-hand account of how the winning strategy has recently shifted to prioritizing efficient solve times and orchestration pipelines that can combine the speed of lighter-weight models on easier challenges with a heavy-hitting model’s reasoning capabilities. We also highlight why the success of LLMs in CTFs does not translate as effectively in the arena of professional security assessments.

The AWS Console and Terraform Security Gap

Are you using Terraform to build or configure your AWS environment? You might be surprised by configuration settings that introduce vulnerabilities by default, particularly if you’re already familiar with using the AWS or other cloud provider interfaces for asset creation. This post focuses on the slowly growing security divide of AWS asset security settings when created by the Terraform provider vs the AWS UI.