DrumLine

This is what the user sees when Gmail is opened.
What the user sees when they attempt to open an email that could be a phishing email.
Simple "yes/no" for the user to determine "is this a scam?"
Comprehensive overview if the user would like to see.

We talked to the CIO of CapeLogic, a Cybersecurity consulting firm, and discussed the major cybersecurity issues that are prevalent throughout the world. Additionally, we contacted professionals in the Information Technology field. They all agreed on a single issue, email phishing is very common in older people and there is no application that allows them to easily easy which emails could be phishing, and what they should do.

Our product is a browser extension which can be easily downloaded and integrated seamlessly into a user's Gmail interface. It automatically scans emails, and gives a comprehensive overview of the email if requested. The interface is extremely intuitive, making it ideal for an older market costumer base.

The browser extension was built with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a Manifest V3 JSON configuration file. HTML is used for the user interface, and CSS designs the highlighting mechanism and, allows for full integration in Chrome.

One of the first problems we faced was finding an issue that had not had a widely attempted solution. In today’s world, people are constantly innovating, and to try to create a genuinely new solution, we spend a major chunk of our time brainstorming. Next, finding credible sources to support that our problem is relevant and urgent was crucial to the segment of finding a viable solution. Justifying our solution, and proving its efficiency.

The biggest undeniable accomplishment that defined my team throughout this hackathon, was the creation of such a simple tool that performs a task that has been ignored for so long. In addition, the fact that this was my team's first hackathon and we were able to create an application, though simple, makes it an accomplishment to be remembered. The hackathon not only inspired us to create an application for the sole purpose of winning the hackathon, but was also an inspiration that led us to planning the creation of this company in the real world, rather than for the sole purpose of the hackathon. Ultimately, the hackathon introduced us to many challenges and issues all of which we were able to either work around or destroy in their entirety.

We learned several key ideas in the development of our application. Mainly, although there are many applications around the world that may perform services similar to ours, the ultimate truth setting our product apart from others is the simplicity of it. In the beginning stages of creating the application, it became apparent that it was easy to detect the issues and likelihood of scam emails, however it was much harder to actually inform the user of these issues. For example, Gmail has its own tool that filters through messages, however there have been many breaches and it has been proven inefficient time and time again in informing its users of potential phishing emails. The solution we created was a color coded system in which different emails are highlighted in different ways based on their safety.

The future of DrumLine would be an expansion in the platforms and databases that our extension is present in. For example, it could be used to aid schools, senior centers, libraries and local community organizations. Additionally, the alteration of DrumLine itself would be inevitable as its existence as purely an extension would limit the scope of its application. The next step in the expansion of DrumLine would be incorporating the application into Outlook, Yahoo, Mail, messages, and other commonly used nodes of communication. If the price remains at a one-time purchase of 5$ it would be extremely profitable, and eventually the company could likely be sold to a bigger IT firm that could then incorporate it on scales beyond the common utility.