Temsconsu Issues Ethical Hacking Challenge With US$10,000 Reward For Cracking The Security Of Its Excelitte System

Australia-based software engineering firm Temsconsu, the makers of the Excelitte file encryption and database security system, has issued a challenge for ethical hackers and IT experts to crack the security of its Excelitte system and find a hidden line of text. The first person to successfully find this text and notify Temsconsu about it will receive a prize of US$10,000.

The 72-character line of text, composed of letters and numbers, is hidden in either an Excelitte-encrypted file or in the Excelitte database. The person who can retrieve the text and send it to Excelitte's designated email will receive the US$10,000 prize transferred to their bank account or bitcoin wallet. They also need to answer a simple question, as well as provide details such as the device name, file location, or database type, to prove that they have accessed the secret text.

Temconsu Challenge information

Aside from the US$10,000 reward, Temsconsu will offer an employment opportunity, provided that the successful individual is not part of any criminal watchlist.

“The US$10,000 prize and job offer shows how confident we are in Excelitte's security,” says Valentine Wats, founder of Temsconsu. “We've made it very hard for anyone to expose the data we've hidden, but, in the unlikely event someone does, we would like to work with them because that means they know something that we don't. Every week, we look at everything that happens in the field of cybersecurity, such as hacking incidents and data breaches, and see how we can counter these attacks. We go into the dark web to study how hackers operate from an ethical point of view and reverse-engineer their methods to ensure that Excelitte's security is watertight.”

According to Wats, the challenge demonstrates the importance of cybersecurity in today's environment, especially since many large public and private sector organizations have digitized their data and stored it in on the cloud or on devices connected to the internet. Cyber theft and other cybercrimes have been rapidly rising in recent years, with major hacking incidents hitting the news headlines every few weeks. This does not include the thousands of smaller incidents that do not gain media traction.

Cybercrime can be particularly costly for organizations of all sizes, with more than US$10.3 billion in total losses for 2022. Ransomware can be particularly devastating for business operations, with the compromised devices and network left inoperable unless the victims pay the ransom.

Excelitte strengthens organizations' data security protocols by instantly encrypting data, both at rest and in transmission. It encrypts files and converts data via a web-based software database application, which can only be accessed via three-factor authentication, which exceeds the current industry-standard two-factor process.

“The cybersecurity problem has never been this big. The average smartphone today holds more data than I had access to 20 years ago, working for a major utilities company. So much sensitive personal data is at risk every day, and it's important that organizations adopt the highest standards of data security, such as what we put in Excelitte, to protect their clients and their own data,” Wats says.

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