From the CyberChallenge podium to Defcon in Las Vegas: how a young Italian talent is turning curiosity into digital defence
After telling the story of Jacopo Di Pumpo, a young talent from the Italian national cybersecurity team, today we turn the spotlight on another protagonist of RomeCup 2025 and the Digital Superheroes event, promoted by Fondazione Mondo Digitale and ING Italia with the Job Digital Lab project: Kristjan Tarantelli.
A master's student in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Sapienza University of Rome, Kristjan is the winner of CyberChallenge.IT 2023 in Italy with his university team. He took first place at the European Embedded Security Challenge in Grenoble and sixth place at Defcon in Las Vegas with the mHACKeroni team, in one of the most complex ethical hacking competitions in the world. A member of the national team TeamItaly and the Roman collective “The Roman Xpl0it”, Kristjan embodies a new profile of digital expert: competent, ethical and deeply human.
‘I've always liked IT,’ he said in the Job Digital Lab blog. ‘In high school, I chose applied sciences, then at university I realised that this is a huge world. At CyberChallenge, I discovered ethical hacking: looking for vulnerabilities in systems not to damage them, but to improve them. And always with the permission of those who manage those systems.’
Kristjan honed his skills in reverse engineering, a discipline that combines logic, intuition and patience to dismantle executable files, understand how they work, identify any flaws or neutralise malicious code. But what he is most passionate about is teamwork: "In these contexts, you win together. Everyone has their own speciality. It's like the national football team. Before the games, there are training camps, targeted lessons and reviews. There are a lot of us, up to fifty per team. It's impossible to be good at everything.‘
Last May, interviewed by Francesco Laurenti of Rai News during the RomeCup, Kristjan explained what being an ethical hacker means to him:
’For me, the word “hacker” has many meanings. It's someone who is curious, passionate, but above all creative. Someone who isn't satisfied with the instruction manual, who wants to understand how something really works. Ethical hackers find vulnerabilities and report them, because the goal is to strengthen defences, not take advantage of them.‘
Despite his achievements, Kristjan is looking ahead. After completing his bachelor's degree, he chose to continue his studies in robotics: ’I like working on things I can see and touch. Maybe I'll join a company that deals with automation, maybe I'll start my own business. I'm not sure yet, but one thing I know for sure is that I want my work to help others.‘
For him, well-being is never individual: ’To feel good, it's not enough to feel good on your own. We need to feel good together."
