The CTF scene is dead

The scene that grew my love for CTFs is emptying out. The CTFTime leaderboard has almost no semblance of history or human skill anymore. The 2026 scoreboard is unrecognisable compared to every year before it. TheHackersCrew, alongside many other large and reputable teams, either do not play, play with far fewer people, or struggle to cut into the top 10. Unregulated cheating is through the roof. Some of the best CTFs, like Plaid CTF, are not running anymore.

These sentiments are not only mine. Many members of my local team, Emu Exploit, feel similarly. These are people who consistently attend the International Cybersecurity Championship, perform at the top level in bug bounty programmes, compete in Pwn2Own, and present at conferences including Black Hat. The people losing interest are not casual observers. They are exactly the kind of people the scene used to produce and retain.

The fun of CTFing is gone for many of the people who cared most. The loss is not just a scoreboard. It is the ladder from beginner curiosity to elite competition. It is the craft of challenge design. It is the feeling that a clever human solved something difficult because they understood it deeply.

That legacy is not being carried forward by open online CTFs in their current form. The format is dead. Something else may replace it, but pretending nothing fundamental has changed only makes the loss harder to talk about honestly. It also gives AI shills more room to capitalise on the decline by selling mediocre wrappers back to the community that made the training data valuable in the first place.