Facebook awards N1.4m to winners of hackathon at CyberXchange

Last week, Facebook sponsored a hackathon at the CyberXchange conference in Lagos, Nigeria, drawing applications from more than 250 young, talented students from across the country.

Out of those, 63 students were chosen to come to the CyberXchange event and work for two days on their solutions to real-world security challenges. Each team built a prototype, created a presentation, and pitched their solution to a set of judges, including Yemi Saka of Ernst and Young, Babafemi Ogungbamila of Interswitch Limited, Regina Wallace-Jones of Facebook, and Bankole Oluwafemi of Techcabal.com.

The winning team came up with a solution focused on multi-factor authentication for a large enterprise to help secure the accounts of their employees. The winning team was awarded N700,000 and received commendation from the judges and conference attendees.

According to Wallace-Jones, who is the Head of Security Operations at Facebook, “the competitors worked tirelessly to create their solutions, and we were inspired by their dedication and passion for security. Encouraging this kind of talent is important to the future of the security industry, and that is why we met with several university professors at CyberXchange to talk about how to continue to strengthen security curriculum and training.”

The second-place team received N400,000, and the third place team received N300,000.