This week saw the annual Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference taking place and alongside it the inaugural Cybersecurity Hackathon hosted in partnership with Telkom and Amdocs.
The hackathon adopted the theme, “Fraud Management: Innovating against digital identity theft, business email compromise and insider threat in a cloud-based world”. Teams which participated were encouraged to address technical weaknesses within the ICT sector.
As many as 10 teams participated and attended masterclasses as well as accelerator sessions. From 19th to 21st August, the teams were tasked with developing and presenting their solutions.
The winning solution was developed by Lethabo Makopo, Angelique Mokwena and Lerato Tlhako who make up team SecureIT. All four team members are graduate students from the University of Johannesburg.
“The solution we developed relies on the use of graphical passwords, as opposed to traditional passwords that can be uncovered using keyloggers. We also made sure to mitigate the major cybersecurity vulnerabilities using a variety of coding techniques,” the team said.
For their efforts, the team was presented a cheque for R80 000 and given the chance to present their solution at SATNAC this week.
“On top of the prize money, incubation and partnership opportunities will be considered by Amdocs and the Telkom Future Makers,” said Information Technology Services Group Executive at Telkom, Portia Malueke.
“With young talent like this at the helm of our future innovation, I have no doubt that South Africa’s digital future is in safe hands,” Malueke added.
We hope that the prize money and the exposure to the big-wigs in the ICT sector at SATNAC help make this solution a reality because it’s really rather interesting.
The use of graphics for passwords isn’t new but it’s not especially popular either. Microsoft allows users to set a picture as a password but this functionality has been riddled with bugs of late. A graphical solution for passwords could be rather helpful, especially when 123456 is still an incredibly popular password.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
