MBZUAI student’s start-up wins regional cybersecurity prize

Over the course of the past year, MBZUAI student Ahmed AlShamsi has proved himself as ‘one to watch’. With numerous recognitions and awards for his AI-empowered solutions to some of the region’s most pressing challenges, he recently picked up top honors at the Gulf Hackathon for Cybersecurity in Oman for his project Secure+. 

Since joining the university, the Emirati computer science student, has presented, showcased and pitched a variety of projects at events and competitions in the UAE and GCC, focusing on security and sustainability. 

His latest success came at the inaugural Gulf Hackathon for Cybersecurity, hosted as part of the Regional Cybersecurity Week in Muscat, Oman. AlShamsi and his teammates beat more than 300 applicants to first place for their platform Secure+, which is designed to detect phishing links, identify the source of the phishing attempt, and provide users with data and statistics about the malicious emails.  

“I worked on the project with my friends, and we saw the feasibility of turning it into a product that can satisfy customer needs,” says AlShamsi, who explains that his team benchmarked Secure+ against comparable products in a bid to outperform the competition. 

“We saw the features that others had and started to develop our product accordingly, increasing the features to make us unique,” he adds. “We also compared the accuracy of their models to ours and found that we perform better.” 

AlShamsi signed up to the hackathon on the advice of his mentors at CyberE71 — a program led by the UAE Cybersecurity Council that he is currently a part of. CyberE71 serves as an umbrella for advancing entrepreneurship and innovation within the entire cybersecurity ecosystem, nurturing high-potential ideas from Emirati students. 

He chose to focus on the issue of phishing following comments by His Excellency Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of the UAE Cybersecurity Council, and President of the MBZUAI Alumni Advisory Board, that phishing attacks are not only increasing, but that 25% of attacks that come into a company come through its employees. 

“This was the basis for our idea,” AlShamsi says. “Our project detects the links that are included within emails and uses AI to classify them as either malicious or benign. If it is malicious, our platform allows the user to still browse it safely on our server. A pop-up comes up when he or she clicks the link, and a new tab opens where they can read the email without getting infected. 

“We also provide an admin panel for the company or end user, so they can see valuable information, such as how many links have been sent, where they are pinned, where they are located, what the servers are, and so on. This dashboard includes a map and statistics about all of this, as well as information about who in the company is using our app. It gives a full view for an organization’s security.” 

Tackling sustainability 

Cyber security is only part of what AlShamsi focuses on through his research. He and his team — through a company they created called Y71 — also use AI to tackle sustainability issues and have already won attention for their early projects. 

One such project is AQM+, an AI-powered air quality monitoring system that was named as a winner of the Eco-preneurship Program during COP28. The program was curated by the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation as a strategic partner to the Ministry of Education under the Greening Communities Pillar of the UAE’s Green Education Partnership and hosted in collaboration with the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center (Sheraa) and Expo City.  

AQM+ uses satellite imagery and AI models to monitor sources of pollution around the world, and pinpoints emissions that affect air quality and public health. More recently it was named ‘best project’ in the Air Quality Monitoring category of the UAE Space Agency’s Space Hackathon for Sustainability. 

There was also victory for Y71 at the Gradfund Pitch Battle, organized by the Ministry of Education, giving AlShamsi and his team even greater exposure as they continue to innovate in security and sustainability. 

“We aim to create solutions that address rising problems, from the UAE to the world,” says AlShamsi, who will surely continue to do just that as he builds on his already considerable achievements with the knowledge he is gaining at MBZUAI.