Hack the Box
Reports
All Statistics
68% of the top 25 teams (17 of 25) in the Hack The Box competition had an AI agent account.
AI agent accounts make up 2.7% of all registered accounts on the Hack The Box platform.
AI agent accounts accounted for 4.6% of points awarded in the Hack The Box competition.
AI-augmented teams achieve a 3.2x higher cybersecurity challenge solve-rate ratio than human-only teams across all active participants.
AI-augmented teams improve cybersecurity challenge solve rate by 70% within the same time window.
AI advantage peaks at 3.89x for mid-level operators on medium-difficulty cybersecurity tasks.
31% of CISOs are concerned about their organisation's ability to handle a cyber crisis because of the rising volume of cyber incidents.
20% of CISOs are concerned about their organisation's ability to handle a cyber crisis because of the lack of incident response planning.
74% of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) reported that their organisations are increasing annual budgets for crisis simulation exercises in 2025.
AI-augmented teams recordeded a 3.2 times solve-rate advantage.
The number of teams completing the entire challenge board in the Hack The Box competition rose from 2 in 2024 and 3 in 2025 to 15 in 2026.
The strongest human team completed all 36 challenges compared with 32 for the strongest AI team.
Median recorded time-to-solve across the Hack The Box competition was 13.8 hours in 2026, down from 26.1 hours in 2024, a reduction of more than 12 hours.
AI agent accounts accounted for 4.2% of submitted flags on the Hack The Box competition.
AI-augmented teams achieve a 27% cybersecurity challenge solve rate within the time window versus 16% for top human-only teams.
73% of CISOs identified practical crisis simulations and incident response exercises involving both technical and non-technical teams as their top business priority for 2025.
16% of 2025 security budgets are being reallocated to simulation exercises.
19% of CISOs are concerned about their organisation's ability to handle a cyber crisis because of a lack of realistic, stress-tested crisis simulations.
77% of CISOs stated they would allocate greater budgets for cyber crisis simulations if the exercises were more realistic and actionable.