TAI Challenge 2025 Recap

About the Challenge

This spring, Yury Sergeev, CEO of RST Cloud, reached out with a great idea: to organize a community event for those interested in learning how to use Netlas for threat hunting. RST Cloud has been a long-time partner and an expert user of Netlas in tracking malicious applications and command-and-control (C&C) servers. Given their experience and enthusiasm, I immediately agreed — it was a fantastic idea, and we absolutely had to make it happen.

Preparation took about a month. Over that time, more than 150 people registered—an impressive turnout for a first-time event!

The core idea behind the challenge was knowledge sharing. We structured the tasks across five levels of difficulty, allowing participants to gradually advance from basic training exercises to more complex, real-world research scenarios.

We also hosted a series of training webinars, where we explored the Netlas platform in detail and discussed practical Threat Intelligence techniques.

Webinar Recordings

Netlas How-To Webinar

Tracking Techniques Walkthrough

The Competition

All participants received access to both the Netlas platform and RST Cloud’s tools. Over the course of a month, they worked through the challenges, conducted investigations, and submitted their findings to earn points.

The chart below shows just how active and competitive the event was:

Competition Timeline: Days on X-axis, Points on Y-axis

More than 9,000 submissions were made during the event—an incredible amount of effort and enthusiasm!

And the Winners Are…

• 🏆 1st Place (tie): Daisuke Arai
• 🏆 1st Place (tie): Marc Nebout
• 🥈 2nd Place: Kishan Lal
• 🥉 3rd Place: Koushik Pal
• ⭐️ 4th Place: Kirill Krasyukov
• ⭐️ 5th Place: Eugene Rich
• ⭐️ 6th Place: Andy L
• ⭐️ 7th Place: Thanh Ngo
• ⭐️ 8th Place: Aj Ventura
• ⭐️ 9th Place: Sai Charan Gouda
• ⭐️ 10th Place: Sergey Pisarev

Surprisingly, two participants finished with the exact same number of points—so we awarded both of them 1st place!

👏🎉 A huge round of applause to everyone who took part in the challenge!

Prizes

• 🥇 1st Place: 1000 USDT
• 🥈 2nd Place: 500 USDT
• 🥉 3rd Place: 250 USDT
• 🏅 Top 10 Winners: Annual Netlas Business Subscription + Annual RST IoC Lookup Subscription (100,000 requests/month)
• 📜 All Participants: Certificate of Completion recognizing their “Track Adversary Infrastructure” skills

Participant Feedback

Here are just a few of the messages we received:

The challenges were genuinely engaging, well-designed, and some were delightfully tricky – just what makes a great event.
It’s clear that a lot of time and effort went into creating and coordinating everything. Kudos to the entire team for the quality of the work and the experience you provided.
Looking forward to the next edition!
– Marc Nebout

I’m having to much fun on this challenge 😎 Netlas is a great platform and when needed RST Cloud helps to pivot from malware to ioc’s, reports, etc.. need to stop now and do some actual work 🤣
– j3roen

Thank you so much! @Yury, @Arthur and whole team 🙌 This was an incredibly fun and challenging experience — huge respect to the organisers and the community for making this such an engaging event. I’m excited to see everyone else’s submissions and keep learning until the final wrap-up! 🚀💡
– M1R3DK