Hackers in Kenya are staging a pre-hackbattle, which will see security consultants try out their skills against each other. The competition is in preparation for a similar hackbattle later in the year. The objective of the exercise is to motivate upcoming security experts and also create online security awareness especially to the government. John Gichuki, who is organising the pre-hackbattle says "its a warm up exercise for the hack battle 2012 so that we can have a bigger one this year and get all hackers ready."
He adds, "We currently staged a small hackbattle, so everything is online and ready to go. We are expecting to start on Friday 10th, and we should be able to announce the winners by 14th of February. "Competitors will be expected to register by paying a Ksh 500/- registration fee through M-Pesa.

Gichuki explains that participants will be required to hack into servers that are specially configured to make them difficult to hack into. The servers are hosted in a cloud service at fasthosts.co.uk.

The event comes just after a recent incident where an Indonesian hacker brought down 103 government of Kenya websites in one night. In 2011, there was a previous battle which was held at the iHub. Gichuki says the event was not well attended, though it served its purpose.

More details are available at Kenya's "Security List".