Reflare Hosts DEF CON 34 Biohacking Village CTF With Zero Recorded Incidents

Galena platform ran 50 hours of continuous competition for 67 teams with no unplanned downtime

LAS VEGAS, NV, UNITED STATES, August 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Reflare Ltd, the cybersecurity training company, sponsored and hosted the Capture the Flag competition at the Biohacking Village during DEF CON 34, held 6 to 9 August in Las Vegas.

The event ran on Galena, Reflare’s browser-based training platform. Across 50 hours of continuous operation the platform recorded no unplanned downtime, no service interruptions, and no successful attacks against event infrastructure.

174 players registered across 81 teams, of which 67 entered the competition. Teams submitted 2,240 flags over the course of the event, 405 of them correct, giving a success rate of 18.1% and roughly four and a half failed attempts for every flag captured. Players launched 225 isolated container instances totalling 143.3 hours of hands-on time, averaging 38 minutes per session. Connections arrived from 61 source addresses, with 26 players competing over VPN.

“I only have good things to say about Reflare,” said Danny Hetzel, Lead CTF Admin at the Biohacking Village. “They were flexible, dedicated, and responded nearly instantly to any questions. If we needed something, Reflare moved to meet it. If we had a question, Reflare was there to answer. Sometimes, because of their experience, Reflare met needs we didn’t yet know we had. 10/10, I am excited to work with them again.”

“Running infrastructure for a DEF CON crowd is the least forgiving test there is,” said Paul Ziegler, CEO of Reflare Ltd. “Every person in this event has the skill to exploit any vulnerability you miss – and many will try to for sport. Fifty hours, zero incidents. That is the number we care about.”

Galena is commercially available to enterprises, public sector bodies, and security vendors as a hosted training platform. Customers deploy their own scenarios, exercises, and internal competitions into isolated cloud environments that run in any browser with no local installation.

RCTF, Reflare’s capture the flag subscription, runs on top of Galena and delivers a new breach-inspired scenario to subscribing teams every 30 days.

“We believe defensive capability is built through offensive practice. The competitors at this event sit in the top percentile of their skills. The platform they used is the platform Reflare makes available to any organisation serious about building the same capability in its own team,” added Paul Ziegler.

About Reflare
Reflare builds hands-on cybersecurity training that runs on real machines in the browser. Founded in Berlin in 2009 and now operating from Tokyo and London, the company works with enterprises, public sector bodies, and security teams worldwide.

Reflare Galena is the company’s training platform as a service, provisioning isolated Linux and Windows environments with no installation, VPN, or virtual machine management required. RCTF is Reflare’s capture the flag subscription, built on Galena, delivering a new breach-inspired scenario to subscribing teams every 30 days.

More at https://reflare.com

Matt Wilkinson
Reflare
+44 7861 714033
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