Siberian Federal University Students Plan Program to Recognize Scammers during a Phone Call

Yozik_Dev team of the School of Space and Information Technology came up with a service that allows recognizing scammers during a phone call. The software was noted as one of the best at the Cybersecurity in Finance forum which was held in Yekaterinburg on 15-17 February 2023.

At the forum, SibFU was represented by Boris Kruglov, Grigory Zaev, Egor Adiyatov, Alexander Kirillo, and Ivan Parilov, and by Associate Professor of the SSIT Vitaly Vainshtein who was the scientific supervisor of the team. According to Mr. Vainshtein, the guys managed to create an innovative project since today there is practically no way to recognize telephone scammers during a conversation.

“The software records the dialogue, translates it into text format, and checks for spam or viruses. If there is a suspicion that a fraudster is pretending to be a bank employee, the program transfers this data to the user. Students are going to continue working on the software, and to participate in forums and conferences. The Central Bank became interested in their project and offered the team an internship and joint development of the project with subsequent entry into the market,” emphasized Vitaly Vainshtein.

For the development of this software, Yozik_Dev team was awarded third place at the Cybersecurity in Finance forum held in the Urals. This is the largest event to discuss trends and challenges in the field of information security. The work was evaluated by a commission, which included the chairman of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation Elvira Nabiullina, her deputy Ruslan Vesterovsky, and director of the National Payment Card System Vladimir Komlev.

“I am incredibly happy that I was able to participate in the forum and compete with teams from all over Russia. The organization of the youth program was held at the highest level. It was useful to talk with representatives of the information security department of the Central Bank. We had been preparing our project for two months, so that in three minutes we could present it to such a serious committee. We got a huge amount of positive emotions and learned a lot of new useful information,” added Boris Kruglov, student at the School of Space and Information Technology.