UPDATE 10/24: Check out the winners.

When you read a cybersecurity news article, you'll probably encounter one of these images: a shadowy hacker in a hoody, a glowing digital lock symbol, or a neon screen full of 1s and 0s.

Indeed, the stock imagery for cybersecurity topics is pretty unoriginal and full of dumbed-down concepts that risks perpetuating misconceptions about hacking. But a new project is aiming to change this. Last week, a foundation from Hewlett-Packard's co-founder announced a contest calling on artists to come up with images that can better represent topics in cybersecurity.

"There is a massive opportunity to improve the ways in which cybersecurity is communicated, taught, and visualized," says the Cybersecurity Visuals Challenge from the Hewlett Foundation.

The foundation recognized the problem a few years ago when it announced an effort to develop the cyber policy field. At the time, it struggled to find a cover image to attach to a foundation-sponsored report on the topic.

"The state of cybersecurity imagery is, in a word, abysmal," the foundation's officers wrote in a blog post announcing the contest. "This dearth of quality cyber imagery is a problem because it's hard to wrap your head around something you can't visualize."

To fix problem, the foundation teamed up with the online innovation platform OpenIDEO to host a challenge focused on updating today's cliché cybersecurity stock images. However, the task won't be easy. Artists will need to refrain from using stereotypical images of hardware, and focus on how data breaches, digital privacy, and surveillance can affect real people.

The images will also need to be accurate, without inspiring unnecessary fear and uncertainty. Another goal is to promote education with art that can break down technical concepts into visuals easy for anyone to understand. "The core challenge of depicting cybersecurity visually, of course, is that so much of it is not tangible. How should a visual creator depict a signal speeding along a fiber optic cable? What does a data breach actually look like?"

Even the foundation isn't sure if the contest will work. But it's hopeful the competition will provide some answers on how to better educate public about an important topic.

The challenge is open to people in the US, Canada, India, and more than a dozen other countries. The top five winners will receive $7,000 each. "Their final submissions will then be openly licensed, so that nonprofits, media outlets and anyone else in need of cyber imagery will be able to draw on a visual language that better reflects the reality of cybersecurity," the Hewlett Foundation said.

The deadline for submissions is Aug. 16. A panel of cybersecurity experts will then review the art and create a shortlist of the 25 most promising proposals, which will later be narrowed down to five winners.

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