Winners of Secur'IT Cup Middle east hackathon announced

Kaspersky and CyberTalents hosted the Secur’IT Cup hackathon in Middle East region, where students tackled complex security issues posed by new technologies and competed to win a ticket to the finals of the Global competition.

The event took place on October 29-31, 2020 and was aimed at students aged 18 to 28 from different universities across the Middle East region. They formed 10 teams that were mentored by industry experts. Teams brought new age ideas to help solve cybersecurity issues in security of smart homes with 5G connectivity, enhance application of machine learning in cybersecurity and proposed security awareness games.

Students were asked to submit a short video and or a description to explain their project on the official website. A mentor was then allocated to each team to help students refine their project. Mentors includedЖБ.зЮ

• Ahmed Nosir, Cybersecurity Technical Leader, CyberTalents
• Pavel Gladkov, Business Tracking and Validation Manager, Kaspersky
• Ahmed Shosha, Security Researcher, Microsoft.

An expert panel of judges that involved Andrey Nikonov (Startup Engagement Manager, Kaspersky), Moataz Salah (CEO, CyberTalents) and Osama Kamal (Security Consultant, IBM) took a week to deliberate the winner. Finally, the jury board selected the project “League of Leets” as the winning in this hackathon.

This project is a security awareness game developed by Kareem Selim, Hassan Mostafa, Abdul Rahman Yousry. Students form a team 1337 Geeks and represent two Egyptian universities — Helwan University and Ain Shams University.

This is the 2nd year running where Egyptian students participate in Kaspersky’s internationally recognised SecureIT cup. Due to the nature of Covid-19, this was the first year when online hackathons were hosted by both organisers.