Posted: 1st July 2015

Students from the Departments of Computer Science and Geography won two of the four prizes at this weekend’s London CyberHack for Financial Security, organised by The Accelerator Network, NatWest, and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).   

The challenge was to help NatWest better identify and authenticate their customers, providing a seamless experience without compromising security – and ideally improving it.  The Oxford team, made up of Katriel Cohn-Gordon, Max Whitby and Martin Dehnel from the Department of Computer Science, and Linda Geaves from the School of Geography and the Environment, won both Best Design and User Experience and The NatWest Challenge, scooping £2,000 in prize money.  Their project, based on developing friend-based network authorisation or rejection for potentially suspicious transactions, particularly focused on the elderly or vulnerable people who aren’t tech-savvy or smart phone users.  We join their supervisors (Cas Cremers, Andrew Martin, Marta Kwiatkowska, Jim Hall and Edmund Penning-Rowsell) in congratulating them!