The Bot-Hunting Hackathon
CRI, Education building, University of Haifa
Organizers: The Center for Cyber, Law and Policy
7-9 February, 2019
Thursday 07 February 2019, 16:00
To Saturday 09 February 2019
Botnets in social networks (be it sock puppets, avatars, Chimera, etc.) are manipulating the interaction in the networks: distributing disinformation and fake news (one million users cannot be wrong!), generating false sense of consensus (wow, this statement has one million likes), or even doxxing attacks (a type of a DoS attack against real people). These attacks pollute the interaction and hurt the open democratic exchange of ideas.
Luckily, in the last few months, the great bot project (which Noam Rotem and Yuval Adam founded), started identifying such networks (you are invited to hear their lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqGaeZIgJw or view their site https://botim.online). However, one needs to scale up their operation, and that is why we are holding a hackathon to support this cause, in different directions:
* Developing methods to identify botnets in all social networks,
* Developing technological tools for identification of botnets and fake news
* Developing an add-on to browsers that allows easy reporting of suspicious accounts as well as marks such accounts
* Analyzing the existing data collected from twitter
* Working on new approaches to the problem
So - if you happen to be a developer who wants to share her/his knowledge and time - You are very welcome!
* Note! The code developed during the hackathon will be released as open source code (under GPLv3 or comparable license).
When? Thu.-Sat. 7.2-9.2
Gathering at 16:00
Starting the hackathon 17:00
Where?
CRI
Education building, University of Haifa
Let's go bot hunting!
For further inquiries, please contact the organizers:
Tamir Gadot, Email: CRI@univ.haifa.ac.il ; Office Phone: +972-4-8288337 ; Office Fax: +972-4-8288181 ;