Hack the Box’s latest survey shows teams should amalgamate their human and man-made resources to address growing cybersecurity challenges.
Cybersecurity performance centre Hack the Box has released the 2025 Cyber Skills Benchmark Report, which highlights the role of artificial intelligence (AI) as a security copilot and cyber safety team member.
Hack the box collected data from 120 global participants of a Capture the Flag event held in late May of this year. 4,549 people attended the event, representing 796 international teams and additional performance data was taken from those participants to inform the report.
The findings indicate that while cybersecurity teams are beginning to adopt AI technologies to act as a copilot in the solving of advanced cybersecurity problems, they are not solely relying on it to power security efforts.
While 44pc of the survey contributors used AI tools during the event, primarily for syntax and concept clarification, less than 8pc of teams used the technology to solve the challenge in its entirety, suggesting that the role of AI remains assistive, not foundational. 66pc of teams didn’t use it at all.
According to the report, challenges in areas such as secure coding, web and cloud have the lowest solve rates, despite how critical these skills are to overall digital infrastructure and missions. The report suggests that AI tools are best used in tandem with human ability and knowledge and that they have complimentary attributes.
The results highlighted that AI works at speed to execute time-intensive manual tasks, however, it is not a complete substitute for human judgement in scenarios that require intuition and further context.
“An overreliance on one, be that humans or AI tooling, can amplify underlying security weaknesses and introduce subtle, hard-to-detect vulnerabilities,” said the report.
Commenting, Haris Pylarinos, the CEO and founder at Hack The Box, said, “AI is undoubtedly helping teams move faster, but should be used to augment security efforts, rather than replace human-led knowledge. Security works best when AI is deployed in partnership with a highly trained security team, who are able to support decision-making with automated data and AI tools.
“It’s encouraging to see teams begin to adopt AI for foundational support during this year’s Cyber Skills Benchmark, but there is room for this to grow. Monitoring the performance of AI and humans together is the next step to develop proactive security practices.”
We previously spoke with lecturer in applied cybersecurity at Technological University Dublin and the founder of ZeroDays CTF, Mark Lane about the evolving cybersecurity landscape and how Capture the Flag events are building a new generation of nichely skilled cyber experts.
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