Use Case – Cybermaxx

LBMC was looking for a way to scale their monolithic systems infrastructure for today’s fast-paced and modern world. At the time, each customer had to be manually configured into their systems to handle any unique conditional security services. The amount of work to keep this act up as their customer base grew would bury them. So they knew they needed to think different. With quick thinking on their part and a little help from us and other businesses in the Tennessee area, they turned their systems into a flexible and scalable security service today known as Cybermaxx.

Cybermaxx is a security leader in the tech industry. Click their mascot Maxx to learn more.

Monolith To Modern

While Cybermaxx was migrating to the cloud, we were brought in to determine some ways to make the manual-entry process easier so that new customers with special requirements could be catered to immediately without needing an employee to enter the mainframe and make those adjustments around the clock.

A custom scripting language was proposed that would allow a security analyst to type up some rules and upload them to the mainframe, where the proper services would be interpreted from this file. We called this the “Rule Engine”.

We also discussed optimizing security at a software level by building a custom database that would add meta data to each entry. This would help reduce the amount of human interfacing their analysts would require to ensure the systems were protecting their customers.

Command-line Tooling

The Rule Engine and the rule scripting language would need to be easily managed by their employees. We used python and popular libraries to add another tool into their toolbox. This new utility would add, remove, update, as well as configure hooks to these rules so that whenever a special condition was met, their mainframe would run particular programs on that data autonomously.

Cybermaxx requested other features to be added to of their current tools which were completed promptly.

Custom Language Development

The Rule Script language was a simple programming language that allowed analysts to specify keys of data to look for and what conditions to meet. An analyst could specify how to handle those conditions and the mainframe would trigger whenever those hooks were added in the aforementioned command-line tool.

Redis For Quick Storage

We interfaced with Redis data storage to manage and update business data on the fly. Redis is simple and easy to scale.

Above And Beyond

Below are real events that transpired during our time with LBMC and Cybermaxx that shows just how far we are willing to go when a challenge arises!

Pushing The Limits

Some of our new tools would interface with many of their service providers such as AWS, Tenable, and Microsoft Azure. We used C++, SSL, and cryptography to ensure all communications with their providers were secure. Notably, our Tenable programs were boasting a 30-min processing job over thousands of computers using all available cores on the host machine!

Even though everyone was proud of the efficiency, our bandwidth and consequently the Tenable company added a restriction to require a small interval break between each request to their API.

We made quite the impression!

Beyond Redis – Custom Databases

Cybermaxx was looking for a way to help their analysts reduce their work load. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was considered but the latest AI is costly and machine learning is either too generic or takes too long to train. They needed something specialized today in order to be effective.

A custom database was written to tag metadata with each entry. There was a special algorithm cooked-up that this database format uses to store and fetch important records fast. These records could be displayed from console as a table by analysts who could determine which information was the most critical, saving them time but more importantly defending their customer’s network.

We also wrote and provided a Java plugin for Cytoscape that communicated with the database via its language spec to generate a visual representation of the data and their relationships to the tagged information.

ProtoComplete to the Rescue

A 3rd party was responsible for delivering a sleek new dashboard for Cybermaxx’s security team. Upon delivery it had several issues- a book’s worth. With the 3rd party deciding to look the other way, Cybermaxx came to us. Their dashboard software stack was using Laravel, React, MySQL, and Docker. Printed out on paper were piles of documented issues that were placed into our hands for repairs.

We stomped out every bug and then some.

You need something similar

Featured in this project:

C++
Python
Java
Javascript
AWS
Tenable
Azure
Cryptography
Redis
PostgresSQL
Scalability
Cytoscape
Custom Business Tools