SQUR took first place at the Black Forest Hackathon Pentest: badenova Edition, a 48-hour offensive security competition built around real infrastructure scenarios from the energy provider badenova. Competing as team Whiteforest, we brought home the trophy and the EUR 5,000 first-place prize at the award ceremony on June 19, 2026 at the Badenova Forum in Freiburg.
The competition
The Black Forest Hackathon is run by BadenCampus and Black Forest Innovation. The 2026 Pentest edition ran from June 12 to 14 as a hybrid event: opening in Freiburg, then 48 hours of competition. Participants worked on penetration testing challenges designed to surface vulnerabilities and security gaps before real attackers can exploit them, competing for a prize pool of EUR 10,000. Our founder Adam Lundqvist entered together with Patrik Grobshäuser as team Whiteforest, a white-hat nod to the event's name, and finished first.
Why this one matters to us
A time-boxed competition on unfamiliar targets is a useful stress test: no preparation on the specific scenario, a fixed clock, and results that get compared directly against other teams. It is the same autonomous pentesting engine our customers run, working under competition pressure. Wins like this are one more data point next to our independent benchmark results.
The 48 hours also confirmed something we see in every engagement: the biggest security risks rarely hide in obvious vulnerabilities. They emerge from complex system interactions and unexpected states, exactly the places conventional tools stop looking. That is the case for autonomous pentesting as we build it: analyze continuously, form hypotheses, pursue attack paths, and validate what is actually exploitable.