Benefits Beyond Money

The Client

Ukatemi Technologies is a professional engineering company with demonstrated expertise and experience in high quality and unique cybersecurity services. Ukatemi was founded in 2012 as a spin-off company of the renowned CrySyS Lab of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

The Project

The number and efficiency of cyber attacks grow continuously. Modern cyber weapons can be just as damaging as conventional weapons, therefore cyberspace became the 4th operational area. Targeted attacks are predominantly malware-based here, and well-trained government actors with diverse geopolitical backgrounds must be considered. Some organizations cannot rely solely on IT partners, they have to develop their own defense capabilities, upgrade their own security postures. Ukatemi’s Kaibou products and complementary services provide a flexible yet firm solution.

Kaibou Repo is a huge set of malware samples: 600 000 000 malware (˜500 TB) inspected, which can be read with 1 GB/sec and searched with 20ms latency. Kaibou Lab is a modular and scalable architecture that enables parallel analysis, generates semi-automated reports in a completely safe sandbox environment where advanced malware analysis can be safely performed.

Such solutions require a lot of stamps and seals and certificates to qualify for use by relevant customers, and those customers need sound and complete documentation about the architecture, the APIs, the UI and how to operate the system. I’ve been invited to contribute to organize the documentation architecture and author the vast majority of documents describing the mentioned areas. We’ve employed an agile approach, Markdown language and various tools to create figures and check the documentation.

As such, my contribution also included extensive exploratory testing of the user interfaces of the front-end and back-end systems and components, making me at least a junior-level administrator or user of those.

The Personal Side

As mentioned in my other collaboration with Ukatemi, it was a special pleasure to get invited to collaborate on various projects. Out of those, Kaibou grew the largest, spanning almost three years and conducted in the course of some multiple-months long peaks. During this long journey I could since I had to learn and understand a load of various Hadoop, big data, workflow management and cybersecurity solutions (labels can’t be disclosed for security reasons), as well as the basics of malware and incident detection and analysis.

And it’s not just a l’art pour l’art thingy, even though static and dynamic malware analysis, for example, is incredibly interesting even in itself. But learning about cyber-defense tools inherently increases your sensitivity of such incidents, your awareness of being prone to malicious actors and your consciousness how you act to secure and protect yourself. This is like a great benefit package in addition to the money you are paid.