Among the twelve selected projects are two Colombians: “Hackers Wanted” and “Digital Education 360”.
The Organization of American States (OAS), Cisco and the Citi Foundation announced the winners of the first edition of the Cybersecurity Innovation Fund.
The fund, endowed with US $ 200,000, will finance twelve projects in Latin America whose proposals seek to solve various cybersecurity challenges for SMEs, education, capacity building, critical infrastructure, incident response mechanisms and digital crimes.
117 projects were nominated. “The selection committee of the OAS, Cisco and Citi chose the winning projects based on criteria of impact, employability and trajectory of the founding team,” Cisco explained in the statement.
Among the twelve winning projects are two Colombians: “Hackers Wanted”, an initiative to strengthen technical and pedagogical capacities in cybersecurity at EAN University and development of a cybersecurity support methodology for entrepreneurs and “Digital Education 360 ″ to carry out training for educators, families, and children and teens about digital safety.
Most of the winning projects are part of the member countries of the Cybersecurity Innovation Councils. According to the statement, more than half of these have a gender and diversity approach both in their leadership and in the expected impact of their application.
“The selection of projects selected for this fund represents the enormous potential that our region has and the common goal of seeking diverse solutions to complex problems. At the OAS, we are convinced that the development of these initiatives will contribute to achieving a safer cyberspace for the citizens of the Americas, ”said Alison August Treppel, executive secretary of the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (Cicte).
The other winning projects are:
Argentina: 1. “Identification of vulnerabilities in IoT environments”, a program for the generation of capacities in the detection of vulnerabilities in Internet of things (IoT) scenarios.
2. “NGEN”, a programmable and configurable infrastructure software capable of supporting the management of security incidents in the work environment of a CSIRT.
3. “GIIS”. Organization of a working group that studies and disseminates positive information on the power and impact of social engineering in communities in Argentina.
Chile: 1. “Let’s Program Our Future”, cybersecurity training aimed at girls and adolescents from 13 years of age on basic concepts.
2. “Swetekno”. Knowledge transfer service in internal audits ISO 27001 and analysis of Indicators of Compromise (IoC) for SMEs.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsMexico: 1. “Sensitive information monitoring platform for Federal Government entities.” A tool designed for government entities for the identification, classification and management of sensitive data obtained publicly.
2. “Safe Internet for everyone”. Research and awareness project on public policies and knowledge of threats that affect minors online.
3. “Interactive on digital security in indigenous language.” A portal that provides recommendations on digital security for educators, children, adolescents and parents of indigenous communities.
Uruguay: “ModSecIntl”. Application firewall assisted by machine learning models for combating digital crime.
Brazil : “The LGPD Data Hunter”, the development of text mining software to identify confidential information stored on organization devices.