DeltaHacks celebrates 11 years of empowering students to innovate and create positive change across various fields through hackathon 

On Jan. 11 and 12, 2025, DeltaHacks hosted its 11th annual hackathon for change in the Peter George Centre for Living and Learning, dedicated to empowering students to create positive change in their communities through projects in health care, sustainability, education and technology.

This year, approximately 500 people participated in the 24-hour hackathon, developing innovative projects while engaging in networking opportunities and workshops. After the event, participants presented their projects the following day to a panel of judges who evaluated them based on social impact, technical skill, originality and presentation. 

DeltaHacks organizes four main hacking challenges, each focusing on a broad category such as best environmental hack, best productivity hack, best health hack and best community-building hack. Participants are encouraged to create projects that align with these categories. 

Additionally, DeltaHacks hosted sponsor challenges, where sponsors organized specific hacks. In an interview, Parisha Nizam, co-president of DeltaHacks, mentioned that the National Society of Black Engineers and Procter & Gamble partnered on a challenge aimed at creating a financial app to help students in the Black community overcome biases when seeking financial assistance and resources. 

In addition to the hackathon, DeltaHacks organized a variety of workshops, including sponsor-led sessions like the Dyson Fan Event, Apple Swift Challenge and an Introduction to Cohere workshop. Professional development opportunities were also offered, such as a Resume Roast and a guide to preparing a strong hackathon presentation. To foster community, DeltaHacks hosted fun activities, including a Fire Noodle challenge, karaoke night and late-night games.

Nizam highlighted that the hackathon kicked off with an opening ceremony featuring speeches from key sponsors, including Reserve Power, Swift, Manulife and Procter & Gamble, along with a performance by the McMaster Marching Band.

“Our team really worked hard on elevating the hacker experience. We worked hard on just making the overall organization better. I think our food choices were really good too. This year, we were also able to get an actual photo booth, where we had our own themed photo prints,” said Nizam.

Our team really worked hard on elevating the hacker experience. We worked hard on just making the overall organization better.

Parisha Nizam, Co-President
DeltaHacks

Nizam noted that DeltaHacks focuses on catering to the local community and collaborating with sponsors. According to Nizam, unlike many other hackathons that have a more general focus, DeltaHacks is specifically dedicated to creating positive social impact.

“We’ve seen people coming out of the hack saying they learned something new from the workshops they attended, or they gained new friendships, or they actually landed internships because of the sponsors that are there. There's a lot of opportunities for people to actually get something out of the hackathon while also having fun,” said Nizam.

We’ve seen people coming out of the hack saying they learned something new from the workshops they attended, or they gained new friendships, or they actually landed internships because of the sponsors that are there. There's a lot of opportunities for people to actually get something out of the hackathon while also having fun.

Parisha Nizam, Co-President
DeltaHacks

The project titled WhaleBeing won first place and the Dyson Innovation Challenge with their web app, which features a prediction model that maps how ship routes interact with blue whale habitats.

Nizam shared that, for the first time this year, DeltaHacks aimed to give back to the community by allowing the first-place winner to select a charity to receive a $500 donation. WhaleBeing chose to donate the funds to a whale conservation organization.

Nizam noted that while the hackathon is their main event, DeltaHacks encourages students to participate in club events and workshops held throughout the year. For more information, interested individuals can visit their Instagram page.

McMaster has beefed up its cyber security infrastructure. The University’s Technology Services department now employs four full-time Information Technology security specialists, compared to only two in the past.

The change comes amid growing concern over the prevalence and severity of hacking attempts directed at post-secondary institutions.

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“[Attacks] happen daily,” said Paul Muir, McMaster’s new Systems Integration Specialist.  “And [they] happen to a lot of systems across campus.

Many of these attacks are relatively unsophisticated, and rely on tricking users into giving up personal information.

“We see the vast majority of compromises coming in through the vectors of phishing and bad, malicious websites where bad code gets run on your computer without your knowledge,” said Richard Godsmark, the senior manager of the IT Security department. Godsmark came to McMaster from Wilfred Laurier University to help develop the university’s security systems.

The fact that many people are not aware of all the dangers they face when casually browsing the internet makes it easy for hackers.

“When you’re on the internet, you feel you’re in a safe place […] and so the chances of being munged online are far greater, and you may not necessarily know it,” explained Godsmark.

For this reason, IT Security spends their time not just directly stopping hackers, but also trying to educate people on campus about how to protect themselves on the internet. October is recognized internationally as Cyber Security Awareness Month, and the department is using the event to kick-start some local initiatives. Primarily, they are trying to boost their campus presence with a poster campaign, active Twitter account and weekly McMaster Daily News posts.

Godsmark encourages people to be more aware of the information about themselves they post online.

“The great thing and the worst thing about the internet is once you put it there, it’s there, and it’s very hard to pull that information back out,” he said. “Everyone has a role in security, whether they know it or not.”

The need for a new strategy was thrown into sharp relief last year when McMaster was targeted as part of an ambitious, sophisticated “hacktivist” attack. Hacktivism is a growing phenomenon in which tech-savvy internet activists band together and target the websites and data of organizations or companies whose policies they find objectionable.

Last September, one such group targeted the top 100 universities in the world in protest of rising global tuition fees. They successfully broke into some of McMaster’s systems, although Godsmark says they compromised no sensitive data.

“What they ended up seeing wasn’t actually core systems, it was a couple of faculty servers that in reality had some stale information in them.”

However, the main goal of the attack was not necessarily to steal important university data. Rather,  “it demonstrated the fact that they were able to access our information,” said Godsmark.

This year, there are twice as many IT Security specialists as there were at the time of the attack.

“We’re here to protect not only the intellectual property of the organization, but the private information of individual students, staff, and faculty,” said Godsmark. “It’s very important.”

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