March 13th: The Indian School of Business (ISB), through its Institute of Data Science (IIDS), in collaboration with the Punjab Police State Cyber Crime Division and the CyberPeace has announced the launch of the National Hackathon on Cybersecurity & AI Safety 2026 — a major national initiative to strengthen India’s capabilities in cybersecurity, digital resilience and responsible artificial intelligence.
The hackathon will bring together students, researchers, technologists, law enforcement professionals, and policy experts from across India to develop innovative solutions addressing emerging threats in digital security and AI Safety. The initiative seeks to catalyse grassroots innovation, generate open-source tools and datasets, and contribute to national policy discussions on AI safety.
Participants will work across five cutting-edge problem tracks:
- Cyber Fraud Detection: Addressing financial cybercrime in BFSI, telecom, and fintech sectors, with particular relevance for law enforcement.
- Misinformation & Deepfake Defence: Building tools to detect synthetic media and AI-generated disinformation to prevent political manipulation.
- Agentic AI Safety: Ensuring autonomous AI agents remain controllable, interpretable, and accountable in real-world deployments.
- LLM Safety & Adversarial ML: Red-teaming, adversarial testing, and responsible alignment techniques for large language models.
- Network Defence & Digital Forensics: Strengthening intrusion detection and forensics capabilities for India’s critical digital infrastructure.
