Threat Terminal v2.0: PvP Is Here
Real-time 1v1 ranked matches, a new unlock ladder, and a terminal AI that will not stop talking. Threat Terminal v2.0 goes live tonight.
Threat Terminal is a cybersecurity research game where you read AI-generated emails and decide: phishing or legit? Every answer feeds a live study measuring which phishing techniques humans actually miss when the writing quality is no longer a giveaway.
v2.0 adds competitive multiplayer, a progression overhaul, and a personality. It goes live tonight.
Head-to-head PvP (Season 0)
This is the big one. You can now queue into real-time 1v1 ranked matches. Both players get the same 5 cards, same deck. It is pure speed and accuracy. Get one wrong and you are eliminated. First to finish wins. No safety net.
There are 7 ranked tiers, Bronze through Elite, with skill-based point scaling. Beat someone above your rank and you will climb fast. Lose to someone below you and you will feel it. After 10 rated matches per day, points taper off so grinding is not the strategy. You have to actually be good.
If nobody is in queue, you get matched against a ghost (bot) for unrated practice. No dead lobbies, no waiting around.
New unlock ladder
Everything is earned now. Modes unlock progressively as you contribute to the research:
- 10 research answers: PvP unlocks
- 20 research answers: Daily Challenge unlocks
- 30 research answers: Freeplay unlocks
This replaces the old system where everything opened at once after graduation. New players get a clear path forward, and the research pipeline stays healthy. Everyone contributes before they compete.
SIGINT: your terminal handler
Meet SIGINT. It is a new AI personality that lives in the UI, and it has things to say. It greets you when you log in, reacts to your milestones, and has opinions about your gameplay. There are 50+ rotating welcome-back messages (no repeats until you have seen them all), plus milestone dialogues for things like your first PvP win, unlocking a new mode, or hitting a streak.
SIGINT never teaches you how to spot phishing. That would compromise the study. It sticks to game mechanics, dry humor, and the occasional existential comment about being code. Think of it as a handler who is weirdly invested in your performance but contractually forbidden from helping.
Inventory and cosmetics
A new Inventory tab houses your unlockable themes, achievement badges, and promo codes in one place. Badge rarities now have visual effects. Common badges look clean. Mythic badges shimmer. You will notice.
Season 0 exclusives
This part matters if you care about bragging rights. If you play ranked PvP during Season 0, you can earn exclusive seasonal badges tied to the rank you finish at. There is also a Founder badge for early adopters. These will not come back. When Season 0 ends, they are gone.
What changed under the hood (research)
This release also coincides with Phase 2 of the research methodology. In Phase 1, emails showed authentication headers (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), Reply-To fields, and send timestamps. We observed that players were anchoring on PASS/FAIL headers instead of reading the actual email, which is the opposite of what the study measures.
Phase 2 strips those signals out. The game now focuses purely on email content, sender domains, and URLs. No more shortcuts. Phase 1 data is preserved so we can compare the two.
If you have already played, your answers still count. If you are new, you are jumping straight into the cleaner version of the study.
The numbers so far
- 1,000+ AI-generated email cards in the research dataset
- 6 phishing techniques tested (urgency, authority impersonation, credential harvesting, hyper-personalization, pretexting, fluent prose)
- 30 research answers per player (keeps the dataset balanced)
- 6 unlockable terminal themes (Phosphor, Amber Alert, Frost Bite, Phantom, Red Team, Ghost Protocol)
- 20+ achievement badges across 9 categories
- 7 PvP rank tiers (Bronze through Elite)
How to play
Head to research.scottaltiparmak.com. No security background required. If you use email, you are qualified. Sign in with a magic link, pick a callsign, and start classifying.
After 10 research answers you can start competing in ranked PvP. After 30, everything is unlocked. The whole thing takes minutes to get into.
What's next
Season 0 goes live tonight. Climb the ranks, earn exclusive badges, and help answer the question: which phishing techniques do humans actually fall for when AI writes the emails?
Get in early. The Founder badge is not going to earn itself.
More posts
What's Coming in Threat Terminal v2
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Fluent Prose: The Phishing Technique Security Training Ignores
Early findings from Threat Terminal show that phishing emails with no urgency, no threats, and no red flags bypass humans at roughly three times the rate of credential harvesting. Security training has the emphasis backwards.
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I write about the security topics that interest me: IAM, cloud security, automation, threat intelligence, phishing, and incident response. If this was useful, there is more where it came from.