b01lers 2025 wrapped

Stats, visualizations, and more to sum up b01lers' 2025.

Data last fetched on 2026-01-02.

This year, b01lers was the #1 scoring US university-affiliated CTF team. Here's a geospatial chart showing the location of each US university CTF team, with each circle scaled by their CTFtime rating this year:

By the numbers, here's how b01lers compared to other university teams in 2025:

University teams were manually taken from team descriptions and CTFtime's "academic team" label. Only university teams in the top 50 US were counted.

This year, b01lers achieved (by a high margin) the highest country rank and CTFtime score in the team's history. Here's a plot of the team's CTFtime rating over the years to show how far we've come:

(compared to Sigpwny, in yellow, and PBR in orange). Of course, this has led to the team's highest country and global placements, plotted below:

These were b01lers' top 10 CTF finishes in 2025:

Though this method isn't perfect, by plotting the sums of b01lers' top 10 CTF ratings at each CTF's end timestamp, we can somewhat reverse-engineer the team's CTFTime rating throughout the year:

(If you're wondering why the above chart does not match the team's actual CTFTime rating at the end of 2025, the chart only counts points gained from competing in CTFs, and doesn't include points gained from hosting b01lersCTF 2025.)

How is CTF weight correlated with eventual rating gain? In 2025,

If we examine historic data across all years,

(Seemingly, the only universal correlation is participating in 20- and 100-weight CTFs and not placing well 😅).

What about individual challenge solves? If we plot an area chart of challenge solves over time grouped by category (binned by month),

Disclaimer: the {blockchain, jail, osint, programming, welcome} categories were introduced with the bot rewrite on 07/2024. Prior to 07/2024, these solves were included in other categories (mostly misc).

If we bin by year instead, we can see that b01lers has remained relatively consistent over the years (with perhaps a degradation in pwn):

And just for fun, here's b01lers' cumulative solves over time: (since 2023, we've solved almost 2000 challenges!)

When was the b01lers server most active this year? Here are 2 heatmaps of aggregate message counts, grouped by day-of-year and hour-of-day, respectively:

(you can see the effect of b01lers CTF 2025 on April 18-20th in the day-of-year graph, our first official Fall meeting on September 5th, CSAW quals on September 12th, as well as the weekly Peppercorns chatter and eCTF / topic sessions shaped hole on Monday in the hour-of-day chart).