Twice a year, the LogRhythm Research and Development team hosts an internal hackathon event to give our engineers an opportunity to collaborate, share innovative projects, and get awarded for their ideas. Past and present hackathon projects have inspired Product and Engineering leaders to implement some of these concepts into LogRhythm’s product offerings.
Our most recent event, Camp LogRhythm Hackathon, was an absolute success! Across the organization, numerous employees paused their regular work to innovate amazing concepts, and it was incredible to see how much they achieved in just a few days. Twenty-three teams submitted demo entries to compete in five categories: Most Shippable, Most Strategic, Best Internal Tool, Most Popular, and Founder’s Award. Here is a recap of the hackathon winners and some of the creative and inspiring ideas that were presented.
Hackathon Award No. 1: Most Shippable
This category is for projects that are “ready to go” as a product feature. We commit to shipping the feature in a release within the next 12 months.
Winner: Nemo
Presented by Gerald Ottman, Jason Kemmerer, and Kevin McCarty.
Team Nemo put together their brainstorming caps and backend skills to create a chip-based search workflow. This improves the user experience for analysts trying to search for log data in the LogRhythm SIEM Platform. Using this method, you can construct color-coded search filters with easy-to-read descriptions of what you’re filtering on.
Runner Up: AppOps
Presented by Mohammad Ikram, Justin Henning, Dan Faber, Sagar Muppaneni, and Ben Yuill.
Customers embracing Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) need help to identify WEF hosts and auto-populate identifiers coming from WEF. Team AppOps created a solution that achieves Automatic WEF host creation and enrichment feedback loop. Moving forward, administrators will be able to tag WEF log sources and have LogRhythm automatically create entity hosts and populate their Windows (Netbios) Name, DNS Name, and IP address identifiers. These hosts can also be automatically retired if they are not seen in the WEF log sources in a configurable amount of time.
Hackathon Award No. 2: Most Strategic
This category is meant for technology demonstration projects, deep thinking, and out-of-the-box ideas that help form and drive our strategic technical roadmap.
Winner: Permutators
Presented by Angela Princy, Abi Wilson, Jhansi Cherukuri, Beniya Benraj, Kundhavi.KV, Kevin Kenneth, and Shibin Christudhas.
Customers using MistNet NDR need support to detect, respond, and report on advanced attacks that span across multiple entities. Team Permutators’ solution achieves multi entity case creation followed by check (case events) against the event sequences predefined in the sequence rule. Moving forward, a security analyst can group suspicious events observed in the network and create a Case. The incident gets timely attention, and the cases automatically expire in a configurable amount of time. This reduces manual effort for analysts checking for attack patterns. Also, analysts can come up with new sequence rules and get them added to rules file.
Runner Up: Whiskey
Presented by Steve Smith, Jeff Braucher, and Richard Pickering.
The Whiskey team created project Windex to show how LogRhythm’s best-selling hardware appliance, the XM, could be enhanced with a virtualized DX appliance in a renewed push to support modern Linux operating systems. The new system provides the combination of the XM and DX appliances in a single box, coupled with an upgrade to a more modern Enterprise Linux distribution and with the OpenSearch database product installed in place of Elasticsearch for better performance and new log indexing capabilities. Additionally, the system was preloaded with a collection of custom-tailored OpenSearch Dashboards to provide customers with invaluable visualizations and custom reporting of indexed logs not currently available to XM customers. The goal of the project was to demonstrate LogRhythm’s commitment to Enterprise Linux while also providing enhanced performance and data visualization capabilities not currently possible with LogRhythm’s XM appliance.
Hackathon Award No. 3: Best Internal Tool
This category is meant for projects that improve our ability to develop, test, deliver, and support LogRhythm, or that just make the lives of the R&D team better.
Winner: LogBlaster3000
Presented by Adam Trout, Shailesh Pandey, Michael Villavicencio, and Hoang Tran.
The LogBlaster3000 team created a new tool to generate logs, which will be useful both for more efficient and improved testing and for getting data into the system that can be used to help with both development and demos.
Runner Up: Data Miners
Presented by Abi Wilson, Angela Princy, Arnold John, Rajesh Kumar, and Thiru Selvam.
Data Miners created a newly developed tool for processing databases that is useful for developers. Many database tools do not support web compatibility and are designed for standalone use. To help with the need for a dedicated user management system, Data Miners created a solution called DBExplorer, a web-based database management tool that can be used at the organizational level and for personal use. The solution supports SQL/NoSQL database management systems, and every user has a dedicated space where they can configure their server details and independently carryout data manipulation tasks on their specified database server.
Hackathon Award No. 4: Most Popular
Everyone who participates in the hackathon votes for their favorite projects. This category is reserved for the projects that most resonate with the R&D team.
Winner: PowerAutoLike
Presented by Eric Hart and Chuck Talley.
Team PowerAutoLike created a revolutionary internal tool that is a secure, no-code solution to help employees stay engaged on social media and like content with little effort. Eric Hart and Chuck Talley’s solution enables users to easily leverage Microsoft’s PowerAutomate and LinkedIn’s APIs.
Hackathon Award No. 5: Founder’s Award
LogRhythm’s Chief Scientist and Co-founder Phil Villella arranged a special panel of judges to determine the recipients of the Founder’s Award. The award goes to the project that best exemplifies LogRhythm in values, culture, strategic direction, and business impact.
Winner: Nemo
Presented by Gerald Ottman, Jason Kemmerer, and Kevin McCarty.
Along with winning the Most Shippable award, team Nemo also attained the Founder’s Award for their impactful and intuitive concept regarding their chip-based search workflow.
Stay tuned for more Hackathon inventions
We are constantly striving to solve our customers’ challenges and make it easier for security teams to defend their organization. Our hackathon event was packed with creative ideas that pushed innovative boundaries. Although some of the projects presented are for internal purposes (or for just pure fun), several concepts may influence future product offerings and capabilities. Stay tuned to see what ideas come to life for our customers.