In the summer semester 2025, the popular “Hacker Contest” at the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU) and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) will once again place the students' hacking skills at its center. In the course, participants gain valuable insights into the world of IT security and learn how vulnerabilities in networks and systems can be identified in the PentestLab of the usd HeroLab.
As every semester, those who wanted to take part had to complete the Hacker Contest Challenge: This time, the goal was to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities in a deployed web application and combine them into a logical attack chain to gain root access to the Docker container.
Our experts from the usd HeroLab have published this year's task and a sample solution in their LabNews. You want to know what the challenge looked like in summer semester 2025 or what details you missed?
