Kaseya is one of the hottest tech companies to work for right now. Headquartered in the exciting city of Miami, which is experiencing a tech renaissance, the company is committed to helping employees — known as Kaseyans – grow on their professional journeys. Through programs like Grow Your Own, they receive training, mentorship and leadership development to move up within the organization.
Additionally, Kaseya has partnered with various universities in its home city to create a workforce pipeline and ensure graduates are entering the workforce with the skills needed to succeed on the job. Most recently, Kaseya participated in Florida International University’s Senior Capstone in the College of Engineering & Computing. Members of Kaseya’s leadership team mentored four teams, assigning them four real-world challenges to see how they’d go about solving them, and even getting a chance to have their ideas implemented within the company.
“Senior Capstone has mutual benefit for both industry and academia. At Kaseya, we cherish the opportunity to work with students to help us set them up for success working through real-world industry challenges. By working with Kaseya, the students gain valuable insights into the inner-workings of a major tech company and are able to put what they learned in the classroom into practice,” said Mike East, Kaseya’s V.P. of Research & Development. “For us, as a company, it’s important to mentor the next generation in tech, especially here in Miami. As part of Kaseya’s Grow Your Own Program, we are focused on building and keeping engineering talent right here in Miami’s rapidly growing tech sector.“
Here’s an overview of the projects:
Churn Detection Modeling
The purpose of this project was to develop a statistical model that would predict whether a customer would renew a product subscription, officially known as customer churn. “The students were eager to apply their classroom learning to the real-world challenges. I think there were some surprises along the way around what aspects of the process present the greatest challenge – it gave them a good sense of what real issues are faced by teams in this field,” said Lina Sokol, Kaseya’s Director of Sales Strategy and Operations.
“I had a great experience working on the churn detection modeling project. In the end, we had a usable prediction model that we were proud of, and we set the foundation for future potential improvements to the prediction model,” said team member, Jose Iturria, who graduated this spring with a B.S. in computer science. “I’d also like to thank Kaseya for sponsoring this project. Our product owner, Lina Sokol was responsive, alert, and clear in the requirements of the project. She was a great mentor and product owner for this project, and we definitely owe it to her for pushing us to continue learning and focus on elegant solutions.”
Automated Threat Modeling
This effort focused on creating a mechanism to automatically detect the global attack surface for a given environment. Project lead, Win Pham, Kaseya’s VP of Development, explained that students were tasked with creating an automated system to identify the attack surface given limited input in the form or a URL, domain, or IP address range. The project involved research into various methodologies and required that students put themselves in the mindset of an attacker. They explored various network tools and created a web interface to launch them and display the results.
“The students were able to identify some potential techniques and tools that could be matured into a service offering that could enhance Kaseya’s IT Complete Security Suite,” Pham added.
Ransomware Anomaly Detection
This project centered around detection of anomalous behavior on a local system using machine learning with ransomware. The students were given two topics around ransomware detection. The concept selected was to analyze log data using machine learning to determine if ransomware is present or being staged on a Microsoft Windows device.
“The students had an eagerness to apply their technical skills to the project and excelled at scoping the project to fit the timeline,” said Carl Banzhof, Kaseya’s VP of Engineering and co-founder of RocketCyber, a Kaseya company and managed security operations center (SOC) platform.
The final team’s project was Network Outage Call Home where they built and connected a Raspberry Pi – a personal computer built into a compact keyboard – into a network so when it lost outbound connectivity, it would send alerts via a GSM network to proactively alert its owner that the network was down.
Read more at Kaseya.