Hack The Border 4.0

Introduction

Welcome to Hack the Border 2025 — Adversarial Thinking & Cybersecurity with AI.
Your mission is to build (or teach) people-first defenses that help our El Paso–Cd. Juárez community anticipate, test, and counter modern threats—phishing, social engineering, deepfakes/voice clones, data mishandling—using AI as a tool for defense and a lens to reason about risk. Whether you’re shipping a working prototype or producing a tight educational piece, submit a Devpost project and a mandatory video that clearly shows the purpose of your project.

Quick start:

1. Pick a track (or propose a hybrid).

2. Scope a single core flow (for builds) or one practical behavior (for education).

Devpost (how to use)

• Devpost Help Center: https://help.devpost.com/

• Create/Update Your Project Page: https://devpost.com

• Join a Team / Team Management: https://help.devpost.com/

• Add a Video to Your Submission: https://help.devpost.com/

• Submission Rules & Editing After Submit: https://help.devpost.com/

Tip: One submission per team. Add all teammates, include your video, and double-check your project is associated with the correct hackathon before the deadline.

Rapid prototyping & hosting

• Vercel (deploy React/Next): https://vercel.com/

• Netlify (static sites, forms): https://www.netlify.com/

• GitHub Pages (static hosting): https://pages.github.com/

• Glitch / Replit (quick server or front-end sandboxes): https://glitch.com/ • https://replit.com/

AI & data (use responsibly; disclose assistance)

• Google Colab (free notebooks): https://colab.research.google.com/

• Hugging Face (models/datasets/spaces): https://huggingface.co/

• Open model hubs & evals: https://huggingface.co/spaces • https://paperswithcode.com/

• Vector/search libs: FAISS, Chroma, Pinecone (free tiers): https://faiss.ai/ • https://www.trychroma.com/ • https://www.pinecone.io/

Synthetic data & privacy helpers

• Gretel (synthetic data): https://gretel.ai/

• ydata-synthetic (Python): https://github.com/ydataai/ydata-synthetic

• Presidio (PII detection/redaction): https://github.com/microsoft/presidio

• Open-source licensing & attribution guide: https://opensource.guide/legal/

Accessibility & internationalization

• WCAG quick guide: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

• WebAIM (captions, contrast, alt text): https://webaim.org/

• Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools audit): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/

• i18n basics: https://www.i18next.com/ (React: react-i18next)

Video, captions, and media (for the mandatory video)

• YouTube Studio (auto-captions—edit for accuracy): https://studio.youtube.com/

• Descript (edit, overdub, captions): https://www.descript.com/

• CapCut / DaVinci Resolve (free editors): https://www.capcut.com/ • https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

• Canva (slides/social assets): https://www.canva.com/

Design & UX

• Figma (edu plan available): https://www.figma.com/education/

• Whimsical (flows/wireframes): https://whimsical.com/

• Plain-language writing: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

Security basics

• OWASP Top 10 (web security): https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/

• npm audit / pip-audit (dependency checks): https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/commands/npm-audit • https://pypi.org/project/pip-audit/

Contact Us & Support Channels

• Event Organizers
  • cservin1@epcc.edu
  • nmerzlya@epcc.edu
  • jrami904@epcc.edu
• Discord: announcements, Q&A, team-help channels
• Day-of Help Coaches: Coaches will be available on the second day to provide guidance at the stations