Happy Thanksgiving from the Splunkernauts! We hope that everyone is spending time with their loved ones and using this break to recharge a bit and get ready for the last two weeks of the semester! This semester has flown by and we are ready to finish strong! We are spending this week working on our SLDR report and presentation. As we finish the SLDR, we are excited for what the next semester has in store!

This week the Splunkernauts participated in the IPPD Prototype Inspection Day. This is a day where all teams have the opportunity to showcase what they have created so far and get feedback from other coaches and industry professionals. It was a great time and we got some great feedback going into the System Level Design Review.

Some of the key feedback we got was relating to our wireframes and mock UI. We wanted to ensure that they weren’t to noisy and appeared clean. We also presented a Splunk dashboard that displayed data from a script that detected current running processes.

Last week the Splunkernauts were able to visit RTX in Largo, FL to present our Preliminary Design Review! We were able to get some great feedback from our liaisons and the other engineers present, and have some great ideas to move forward with. We have our prototype inspection day this week and are looking forward to showing off our ideas!

Yesterday, instead of a normal day at IPPD , the Splunkernauts got to attend some great workshops presented by Dr. Manuel Bermudez and Mr. Mark Sanders. Dr. Bermudez gave a lecture on how to approach Agile project management and Scrum, an essential development technique for software engineers. Once beginning development, we are looking towards moving to a scrum methodology.

Mark Sanders from RTX came down as well and gave some great insight into his career as an engineer and how best to start our own careers. The advice he gathered from 15+ RTX employees was very valuable and great to take in as our team looks to start our careers. To the right is the team with Mark, we’re looking forward to seeing him in November for our RTX visit!

Yesterday, the Splunkernauts gave their first presentation to three other IPPD teams. We’ve been working on our Product Design Review presentation for the past week or so and we’re looking forward to more feedback. The team had a great time and appreciated the opportunity to practice in front of a larger audience. Teams Solaris, CyberSign, and Fantastic 5 all had great presentations and we appreciate all their feedback!

Over the past few weeks, the Splunkernauts have been hard at work. We have been meeting with our liaison weekly and the meeting have helped us to paint a better picture of the problem at hand. One of our key focuses has been on learning Splunk.

Splunk is a platform that allows users to search, analyze, and visualize their data.​ Splunk can be used for a variety of different things but for our uses, we will be   creating a security operations center (SOC) and analyzing relevant cybersecurity data. ​As we have been working on learning Splunk, the team has been learning about the potential cybersecurity threats. Some of the attacks we will be focusing on are Man-in-the-Middle attacks, Kerberos attacks, DDOS attacks, and others.

Hello everyone, and welcome to our IPPD blog! Here we will be documenting our journey throughout the year as we work with Raytheon Technologies on the Splunk Enterprise Cybersecurity Analytics project. Our group members are Alec Rothenberg, Tuan Dang, Bobby Price, Ahmed Ebrahim, and Andrew Delpuech, our coach, Dr. Ann Ramirez, and our company liaisons, Joseph Foraker and Mark Sanders.

This past week we have been getting to know each other and understand how we can accomplish our goals as a team. We had our first meeting where we designed our logo and came up with our team name, as well as delegated team roles and created our team charter. For the next week, we are planning to meet with our company liaisons and get a better idea of the problem at hand.