Red Hot Cyber (RHC) is an Italian cybersecurity news platform and community dedicated to sharing knowledge, promoting cybersecurity awareness, and collaboration among professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts.

RHC organizes the annual Red Hot Cyber Conference, a free cybersecurity event held in Rome featuring expert talks, hands-on workshops, and a Capture The Flag (CTF) competition.

The collaboration between FBK and RHC began in 2025 and progressively expanded in 2026, focusing on the introduction of social engineering challenges into the CTF competition.

What has been contributed

FBK’s DAISY research unit contributed social engineering challenges based on HoneyPeople, a research tool originally developed for cyber deception. HoneyPeople leverages generative artificial intelligence to simulate realistic human interactions within controlled digital environments.

During the 2025 and 2026 CTF editions, DAISY developed fictional corporate scenarios populated by AI-driven characters that participants could interact with to solve challenges. The contribution progressively expanded, culminating in a series of six interconnected challenges in 2026, combining social engineering with other cybersecurity tasks.

A key part of this work involved collaboration with HackerHood, RHC’s ethical hacking group dedicated to vulnerability research, practical cybersecurity activities, and knowledge sharing. DAISY and HackerHood worked together to test HoneyPeople and to design, prepare, and validate the social engineering challenges.

The collaboration also provided an opportunity to evaluate HoneyPeople in a competitive environment and collect real-world attack data from participants’ interactions. These data offer valuable insights into attack strategies and support ongoing research aimed at improving HoneyPeople and advancing cyber deception techniques.