Croatian IT Team Win International Competition with Facebook Messenger Project

(L-R Petar (green top), Luka, Stanko, Marko)

A team of Croatian information technology (IT) specialists have beaten 25 teams from all over the world to win the CopenHacks competition held in Denmark’s capital over the weekend…

The 4-member team from Croatia – Marko Božac, Stanko Krtalić Rusendić, Petar Šegina, and Luka Strižić beat teams from the likes of the US, Russia, India, China, Greece, Denmark, Iceland and a host of other nations to win the competition with their ‘messengerPG.Tech’ project.

“We’ve built a browser userscript / extension which adds unobtrusive, end-to-end encryption to Facebook’s Messenger.com. In short, by using this, you can continue using Facebook Messenger as you normally would, only now no one except you and the people you talk to can see the messages being exchanged – not even Facebook. The machines sending and receiving the messages can read their content while others see random letters. The encryption itself is done using GNU Privacy Guard, which is relied on by people and systems all over the world,” they said.

In true hacker spirit, they open sourced it on Github, sharing the code.

Hosted by Microsoft, CopenHacks was conceived with the intention of having both local and international students from many different backgrounds to come together to work on any project they like, using whichever tech they like, with the hopes of starting a more progressive, inviting, supportive, and enriching ‘hacker’ culture in Denmark. Congratulations team.