Muscat – Three Omani students have secured first place at the Hadatha Sectoral Hackathon with a smart platform designed to address key challenges in cybersecurity.
The hackathon was organised by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology last week as part of its drive to promote innovation and digital solutions across priority sectors.
The winning team – Ominx – comprises Mujahid al Sawti, a Sultan Qaboos University graduate and team leader; Yaqthan al Rahbi, an engineering student at SQU; and Zuwan al Saadi from Al Bayan College.
Speaking to Muscat Daily, Sawti said the project began last year as a basic concept to tackle specific cybersecurity gaps and evolved into a full platform aimed at modernising security operations centres.
He said the system uses artificial intelligence and automation to reduce reliance on manual monitoring, improve analysis and speed up decision-making, strengthening institutional cyber resilience.
The platform collects and analyses data from multiple security systems, correlates incidents and provides contextual insight into cyberattacks. It also supports faster responses and reduces analyst workload through automated reporting and intelligent analytics.
Sawti said the team faced technical challenges, including building infrastructure to train language models on specialised cybersecurity data and ensuring compatibility with diverse security systems used by organisations.
To overcome these, the team customised large language models, used smaller models where suitable and relied on application programming interfaces to ensure smooth integration without disrupting existing systems.
He said the win has encouraged the team to develop the platform further, adding that mentoring sessions with experts from the telecommunications and cybersecurity sectors were instrumental.
“The recognition confirmed the practical value of the project,” Sawti said.
He added that scaling the platform would require support from stakeholders in digital transformation and cybersecurity, expressing hope that it could contribute to strengthening national cyber security capabilities.
