In the carpeted ballroom of one of the largest casinos in Las Vegas, the few dozen hackers competing in the challenge sat hunched over laptops from Friday through Sunday during the DEF CON security conference, which hosts the event.

The winning team included participants from Carnegie Mellon University, its alumni and the University of British Columbia.

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The contest involves breaking into custom-built software designed by the tournament organizers. Participants must not only find bugs in the program, but also defend themselves from hacks coming from other competitors.

The hackers, mostly young men and women, included visitors from China, India, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Some worked for their respective governments, some for private firms and others were university students.

While their countries may be engaged in cyber espionage against one another, the DEF CON CTF contest allows elite hackers to come together in the spirit of sport. The reward is not money, but prestige.

"No other competition has the clout of this one," said Giovanni Vigna, a participant who teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. "And everybody leaves politics at home.

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