Great Hackathon Challenge By The Government of India

The security threat landscape has taken a sharp turn in the last few years with the new sophisticated threats impacting all kinds of organizations. While the intelligence-led security ecosystem has matured in the western hemisphere, the same has not happened in India - where both public and private sector organizations face an uphill battle in defending against the advanced threats. The conventional approaches to cyber protection have proven to be lackluster in defending against the present-day threat actors who are well organized, funded and equipped with a sophisticated cyber arsenal.

The solutions has to get customized to help security teams leverage the power of threat intelligence automation to predict attacks by deducing relevant and actionable threat intelligence from threat data and share it ahead with their vendors, and partners in a trusted and collaborative ecosystem. The need of the hour is on how the cyber fusion solutions allows organizations to collaborate against bad actors and respond effectively by covering every aspect of an advanced and proactive security strategy. In today’s world, cyber-attacks have shifted from just being a secondary concern to a real-world threat for organizations globally.

As per PM Narendra Modi, hackathons provide great platforms for youngsters to test their ideas and innovative skills. They can leverage state of the art technology for the solution of global problems.

As we understand on newer technology to bring the challenges and opportunities as the both. AI has become a growing threat to the integrity of elections. A notable example of such threats is the use of AI technologies by our adversaries to enhance the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns. In the past few years, state of the art AI techniques such as Deepfakes have been actively exploited to create fake audiovisual content to fuel controversies and manipulate the public opinion. Moreover, AI-enabled automatic text generation tools have enhanced the efficiency of disinformation efforts in crafting fake news and manipulating the discourse of debates on social media. Another type of threat emanates from the use of AI by social media bots to manipulate automatic content recommendation on social media, and to distort the perspective of users on current events and the political landscape.

To complement the efforts, the department of Telecommunications announces ‘5G Hackathon’ In association with Niti Aayog, MEITY, Digital India, Startup India, MSME, C-DoT, DST, TCOE India, TEPC, TSDSI, COAI, India Mobile Congress, KPMG, Academic Institutions IITs/IIIT/REC, Industry etc. and the Total prize money INR 2.5 crore spread across three phases

The top 100 submissions will get INR 50,000 on being shortlisted and another 50,000 on presenting proof of concept or demonstrable product/solution.

All shortlisted will also get complimentary space at India Mobile Congress 2020 – the biggest digital technology platform in Asia, which will be hosted in New Delhi from 15th to 17th October, 2020.

The need of the hour is to analyse the algorithms that enable the detection of AI-generated text and Deepfakes in real-time. Secondly, the solution would be to create a novel machine learning algorithms that automatically identify networks of disinformation bots on social media and another suggestive mechanism is to build on natural language processing techniques to develop tools that evaluate the trustworthiness of social media accounts and content.