This article was originally published in the 2026 edition of Inside the Mind of a Hacker. To read the full report and learn more about the power of hacker teams, download the full report.
The difference between good and elite teamwork isn’t about adding more people; it’s about adding the right ones.
One team has turned this principle into a winning formula. Meet sw33tLie (Paolo), bsysop (Guillermo), and godiego (Diego), three hackers who work as an elite hacking team. Working across different time zones and languages, these three have developed a collaborative approach to quickly identify critical vulnerabilities. Their prowess recently earned them top honors at Bugcrowd’s Hacker Showdown. But what makes their partnership so successful?
In this article, we’ll hear directly from the trio about how they formed their partnership, their secret sauce to working well together asynchronously, and what organizations can do to attract elite teams like theirs.
sw33tLie, bsysop, and godiego were individual bug bounty hunters before they formed their team. Their initial friendship enabled them to get to know the other in a low-stakes environment, organically building rapport and an understanding of each other’s values. “One thing that’s really important to all of us is the value of personal relationships and enjoying the process,” godiego explains.
It’s also remarkable because all three members represent different generations of hackers. sw33tLie is the youngest of the group, followed by godiego, and then bsysop. But this intergenerational setup actually enhances their work, with more experienced team members offering mentorship while the younger hackers contribute fresh approaches and energy. “Age is just a number in this field,” sw33tLie notes. “What matters is curiosity, skill, and the willingness to learn from each other.”
As a result, they have built enough trust to take the leap and work together, starting with smaller collaborations before scaling up. Today, the team focuses primarily on hacking together at live and other special events.
Instead of adhering to rigid roles, the team adopts a flexible approach in which everyone constantly shifts between leading and following as needed. “Some teams have a lot of big egos and people who try to be rock stars, but we don’t play like that,” bsysop explains. “We’ve kept a no-ego culture; if someone finds a better way, we adapt fast. This mindset lets us scale without losing the creative edge that got us here.” This flexibility also extends to how they continuously improve their collaboration process—after every project, they conduct a retrospective to work even more effectively together.
This ego-free foundation allows each member’s strengths to shine. “Our strengths complement each other, like how one person is good at exploit development while another is stronger at creative recon and changing logic. This mix lets us see the full attack surface, execute faster, and bring forth creative ideas and techniques that lead to interesting exploits,” godiego shares.
This creativity was exemplified during the Hacker Showdown, where their complementary strengths enabled them to discover a rare function injection vulnerability. When sw33tLie found what appeared to be server errors, bsysop immediately jumped in to analyze the anomalies, while godiego handled manual exploitation. Working together, they realized these weren’t glitches at all—they’d uncovered a previously unknown vulnerability. With no documentation available, they reverse engineered the exploit through collaborative experimentation, ultimately finding a way to bypass function errors and access sensitive data, securing their victory.
Working across different time zones is usually challenging for most teams, but the trio has turned this potential obstacle into an advantage. Their solution is an “organized chaos” approach that relies on constant asynchronous communication through a single Telegram thread, ensuring someone is always making progress regardless of who’s awake.
Perhaps most importantly, they’ve learned that maintaining a sense of fun and experimentation is crucial to surviving the stress and long hours of navigating across time zones. “When you’re working together, you can’t focus on the money; you have to remember why you’re there. You’re all just crazy guys trying to hack and find new ways to break something,” godiego notes. That playful mindset not only prevents burnout but also creates opportunity for new discoveries. For instance, when sw33tLie and bsysop became curious about HTTP smuggling techniques, they chased their curiosity with another hacker, leading to the discovery of a critical vulnerability across thousands of Google Cloud websites.
The trio’s success highlights the unique value of teams, specifically their ability to discover vulnerabilities that solo hackers might miss entirely. “When working alone, you might find a lead and investigate it, but if you don’t find anything, you’ll move on,” sw33tLie explains. “When working as a team, we can bring in different skill sets so that it’s easier to keep digging, which leads us to discover more novel vulnerabilities.” Another side benefit is that teams provide better program support through faster response times. With members spread across time zones, someone is always available to communicate with program owners.
Given these advantages, what can organizations do to attract more teams to their crowdsourced security programs? The trio shares four practical tips:
Teamwork makes the dream work in all areas of life—including crowdsourced security. By embracing teams, organizations can access more expertise and creativity to stay ahead of sophisticated threats.
Learn more about hacker teams, the hacker community, and how human ingenuity paired with AI builds stronger security programs by downloading Inside the Mind of a Hacker.