Huge respect to co9 for playing a great game this year. They really went all out, and deserved the win. I'm extremely proud of the progress my team made throughout DEFCON, and we were still always a solid 10 - 15 hours behind them.

This year, co9 actually took the social engineering game to a new level, and registered vanity domains, like http://assimilate.today. They hid puzzles on them that tied into 1o57's game, then they'd leak the domains to other teams playing, and trick them into spending hours solving puzzles that had no solution.

In the case of assimilate.today, I spent hours decoding it to different phone numbers, pointing everywhere from Bermuda to Thailand, and probably woke up a few dozen innocent people with phone calls.

If you like puzzles, riddles, or cryptography, I highly recommend the DEF CON badge challenge. It isn't for everyone, but it's one of the closest things I've found to a real life rendition of an old point and click adventure game.