What is the National Missing Persons Hackathon?
The AustCyber Canberra Innovation Node has partnered with the Australian Federal Police, the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre and Trace Labs to conduct a missing person capture the flag (CTF) event (aka Hackathon) on Friday 11th October 2019. The event will see the gathering of ethical hackers and investigators using online investigative techniques within the bounds of the law to find new leads on real missing persons cases in Australia.
Contestants will be using their cyber skills to gather open source intelligence (OSINT) on long-term and current missing persons using only information that is publicly available on the internet. The goal of this is to generate new leads on cases that can provide assistance to the relevant Australian policing jurisdictions in their investigations.
The event has been modelled against 20 successful missing persons hackathons run by the not-for-profit organisation Trace Labs in partnership with various security conferences, universities, and community organisations within the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia.
This is the first ‘large scale’ crowdsourced open source intelligence gathering of its kind in Australia for missing persons.
If you see yourself as an ‘online investigator’, ‘cyber hacker’ or a ‘cyber sleuth’, then this is the event for YOU!