An all-female team from the University of Johannesburg (UJ) scooped the top prize at Telkom’s maiden cyber security hackathon, held this week at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) in George.
Telkom partnered with Amdocs for the hackathon, challenging participants to find solutions to prevent fraud.
For the hackathon challenge, participants were tasked to develop new capabilities that will mitigate against digital identity theft, business e-mail compromise and insider threat in a cloud-based world.
The organisers say as more businesses are opting to establish and implement cloud-based infrastructure, the risk of fraud and cyber attacks is also on the rise, hence the need for new solutions to curb potential threats.
In fact, Telkom says, 45% of all cyber security breaches are cloud-based, highlighting the immense risk this technology poses when not coupled with the correct cyber security practices.
In response to the challenge, 10 teams of developers took part in designing a solution that could counter the rise of unauthorised SIM-swaps, digital identity theft and business e-mail compromise.
The SecureIT team, an all-female group, comprising of Lethabo Makopo, Angelique Mokwena and Lerato Tlhako, emerged as the winner of the challenge and took home R80 000 prize money and had an opportunity to present their solution to the SATNAC attendees.
"The solution we developed relies on the use of graphical passwords, as opposed to traditional passwords that can be uncovered using key-loggers. We also made sure to mitigate the major cyber security vulnerabilities using a variety of coding techniques,” says Tlhako.
Mokwena adds: “We are so proud of what we have achieved here. As an all-female team, we worked hard to break barriers, challenge ourselves and represent women in technology.”
Portia Maluleke, information technology services group executive at Telkom, comments: “From scalability and flexibility to cost optimisation, the benefits of cloud computing are unparalleled. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the threats and risks that organisations are exposed to, through adoption of this technology.
“On top of the prize money, incubation and partnership opportunities will be considered by Amdocs and Telkom Future Makers. 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.”
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