CYBERKENT 4.0 — National Cybersecurity Competition Final

Uzbekistan's largest live-fire cybersecurity competition reaches its final. CYBERKENT 4.0 closes its fourth season on 5-6 October 2026 at Yoshlar Ijod Saroyi (Youth Creativity Palace) in Tashkent, organised by the state institution Kiberxavfsizlik Markazi (Cybersecurity Center). How the field was decided. Over 300 teams entered the online qualifiers: the Blue Team qualifier ran on 15 September and the Red Team qualifier on 22 September 2026 (10:00-19:00 Tashkent time, with the scoreboard frozen at 18:30). The top 10 teams in each track advance, filling 20 slots in the offline final. The two tracks, both running 48 hours:

• Red Team — offensive operations against production-grade infrastructure. The qualifier covered web exploitation, binary exploitation, cryptography, network analysis and steganography, with a dynamic scoring system and Dockerised challenges reached over VPN.
• Blue Team — defensive operations on assigned systems: SIEM work, log analysis and incident response.

Alongside the two main tracks the final runs a CTF competition and the CyberMergan and CyberQuiz interactive zones. Prize pool: 270 million UZS, split evenly — 90M UZS to the Red Team track, 90M UZS to the Blue Team track, and 90M UZS across the side competitions. Teams are 3-5 operators. Registration for the qualifiers ran from 24 August to 20 September through the track portals (red.cyberkent.uz, blue.cyberkent.uz, ctf.cyberkent.uz); the full regulations are published as a PDF on the Red Team site. Contact: info@cyberkent.uz. Worth knowing: the entry route for this year has already closed — the October dates are the final for teams that came through the September qualifiers. If you want a slot next season, the pattern across four years has been a late-August registration opening with qualifiers in mid-September, so the window to watch is roughly eleven months out. What makes CYBERKENT unusual for the region is that it is not purely a jeopardy CTF: putting a defending Blue Team track on equal prize footing with the attacking Red Team is closer to how a real SOC is tested, and it is the reason the event draws sponsorship and attention from Uzbekistan's national cybersecurity apparatus rather than just the student CTF scene.

Event website