It was a really interesting food for though, especially since both cybersecurity and game development are my main areas of focus (I work part time in offensive security, and part time as game dev). I has actually motivated me to start considering that I might give data-mining this game a try, because I'm really interested in how he wants to solve the many issues present.
I'm betting it would probably be mostly leaning into "security by obscurity", but if that's the case, throwing a gauntlet like this wasn't a good idea. Because every technically sound solution I came up with was a nightmare from game design standpoint, and I couldn't came up with any puzzles or secrets that wouldn't be extremely complex, mostly because you just require a really large problem and input space for it to not be brute-forcable at any of the reverse-engineerable stages.
Also, I have a soft spot for clever marketing tactics, and this one is amazing.