ZeroDayTM

UVT-CTF at ZeroDayTM

On 23 May 2026, UVT-CTF participated in ZeroDayTM at the Institute For Advanced Environmental Research.

The event brought together competition, security talks, and community discussions around practical cybersecurity. For us, it was a chance to represent the team in both parts of the event: on the CTF scoreboard and on stage during the offensive security panel.

We had four members competing in the CTF: Andra Bimbirică, Mark Dragotă, Răzvan Ciobanu, and Ramon Mateaș. After 8 hours of solving, the team finished in 1st place.

CTF

The CTF was the competitive side of the day for us. It was a non-AI CTF, so the focus stayed on manual analysis, technical intuition, and team coordination rather than AI-assisted solving.

Across the 8-hour contest, the team worked through the challenges under pressure, split tasks based on each member’s strengths, and kept pushing until the end. The format made every solve matter, and finishing in first place came from staying consistent throughout the day, not just from a short burst at the beginning.

Offensive Security Panel

UVT-CTF was also represented on stage by Paul Valase and Elias Bota, who joined the Offensive Security panel.

Their discussion focused on pentesting in the real world: practical vulnerabilities, real risks, attack paths, AI, red team vs blue team perspectives, and the difference between CTF challenges and professional pentests.

The panel connected well with the CTF side of the event. CTFs are useful for building technical skill, speed, and problem-solving habits, but real pentests require a different mindset: understanding business impact, chaining realistic attack paths, communicating risk clearly, and thinking like both attacker and defender.

Another talk was held by Fineas Silaghi, our mentor and the CEO of AISafe Labs, in a panel titled Please Hack This Application. Make No Mistakes. He explored how hacking changed between the pre-AI and post-AI eras, starting from real cases where finding and reporting vulnerabilities meant long manual research, careful testing, and a lot of persistence.

He discussed how much effort it used to take to hack targets such as a Canon printer or Meta systems and responsibly report vulnerabilities for a bounty, then compared that process with what is possible today using AISafe. The talk showed how AI changes the speed, workflow, and expectations around vulnerability discovery while still requiring security judgment and technical understanding.

Result

ZeroDayTM was both a competition and a knowledge-sharing event for UVT-CTF. We came back with 1st place in the CTF, and with two of our members contributing to the offensive security discussion on stage.

It was a strong day for the team: one part focused on proving skills in a non-AI competitive environment, and the other on sharing practical security experience with the community.