SK Shieldus said on Sunday that its white-hat hacker group EQST (Experts, Qualified Security Team) ranked fifth among more than 200 teams worldwide in a Capture The Flag competition held at the AI Village during the DEF CON 34 hacking and security conference in Las Vegas.

The DEF CON event is held annually in Las Vegas and features various programmes including talks by security experts, technology demonstrations and village-by-village hacking competitions.

SK Shieldus said EQST was the only participating team from South Korea to make the top five in the AI CTF, demonstrating its ability to solve security problems using AI agents and its AI security capabilities at a global level.

It also participated in the DEF CON 34 CTF finals, competing against global security experts in practical attack and defence techniques.

At this year's DEF CON, technologies such as large language models and AI agents, including AI that judges and acts on its own, were discussed as a major topic for the changes they could bring to the cybersecurity environment. The company said the AI Village highlighted new attack methods and security vulnerabilities surrounding rapidly spreading AI technology, as well as technologies and research cases aimed at responding to them.

Lee Ho-seok (이호석), head of the SK Shieldus EQST Lab team who participated in the competition, said, "At this DEF CON, in addition to existing attack and defence techniques, we were able to directly experience new methods in which AI agents analyse problems on their own and carry out attacks." He said, "We plan to actively use the experience and techniques gained while competing with global security experts for future AI vulnerability and red-team research and for advancing security technologies."