Business Priorities of Chinese Cyber Range Providers Go Hand in Hand with State Cyber Capability Development

China’s cyber range market booms, fueled by the state’s demand for developing capable cyber talent and improving the effectiveness of “attack and defense live-fire capability”

This post is co-authored by the Natto Team and Eugenio Benincasa, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). The report by Benincasa and Dakota Cary, Strategic Advisory Consultant at SentinelOne, titled “Capture The (Red) Flag: An Inside Look into China’s Hacking Contest Ecosystem,” is published by the Atlantic Council in October. The report examines over 120 hacking contests in China since 2004 and delves into the key elements of China’s hacking contest ecosystem, such as growth enablers, competition hosts, and cyber range providers, while highlighting specific contests associated with China’s government security agencies.

In September 2024, the FBI announced the seizure of a botnet operated by Integrity Technology (Integrity Tech), a Chinese information technology company linked to cyber threat group Flax Typhoon, which targeted critical infrastructure globally, including in the U.S. and Taiwan. The Integri…