The Dutch Open Hackathon 2018 has been won by the CrimeBusterBot team, who came up with a tool for identifying malicious websites. In developing the tool, the team utilised datasets made available by Kadaster, the police and SIDN. Their application involves a bot that automatically finds and analyses malicious websites. Over the Dutch Open Hackathon weekend, twenty-three teams worked to devise applications for data put at their disposal by HeadFirst, Kadaster, KPN, the Dutch police, PostNL and SIDN.
More than a hundred developers from the Netherlands and other countries took part in the Dutch Open Hackathon 2018. They were given access to a variety of datasets and APIs by the event's partners and sponsors. At the conclusion, the jury chose CrimeBusterBot because the team had got to grips with a topical issue and made effective use of the data provided by the event partners. The winning team carried off a prize of € 7,500 and the pioneers award presented on behalf of SIDN Fund.
Detecting malicious website networks
The winning CrimeBusterBot solution is an automated bot that detects malicious websites. By using web-crawling results and analysing DNS data, the bot can expose whole networks of malicious websites. In the development of CrimeBusterBot, machine learning techniques were used, so that the tool is able to independently identify websites as potentially malicious. The solution is primarily intended not for consumer use, but to support the police and SIDN in their fight against this form of cybercrime.
Second prize in the Dutch Open Hackathon went to Team Syntax for the development of www.afwijken.com. Afwijken.com is a platform that helps people find a place to live outside the big cities that's perfectly matched to their particular needs, such as security, access to schools and price. The event's audience prize was awarded to A-ware International for developing an on-line challenge designed to make consumers more aware of the dangers presented by ransomware. Finally, the incubation prize was taken by Sharefox, an application for secure file sharing.
"The Dutch Open Hackathon is a special event because it gives developers the opportunity to combine datasets that aren't normally accessible together," said Richard Garsthagen from the CrimeBusterBot team. "That enabled us to come up with a tool that doesn't just identify individual malicious websites, but can actually reveal the networks that they belong to. Once you've spotted one malicious website, it turns out to be quite straightforward to establish whether there are others associated with it."
Open innovation
The Dutch Open Hackathon 2018 was all about open innovation. For this year's event, the venue was the Dutch Innovation Factory in Zoetermeer. The results of the Dutch Open Hackathon 2018 are available here.
The Dutch Open Hackathon 2018 is an initiative by the Dutch Open Hackathon Foundation, Big Data Innovatiehub, Kadaster, the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers (KIVI), KPN, the Dutch national police, PostNL and SIDN.
