Given the rise in cyber incidents and changing threat landscape, hackathons represent an important opportunity for GDIT to come together with our customers and partners to team-build, collaborate and gain hands-on experience solving some of today’s toughest cybersecurity challenges.

That’s why we recently hosted an all-day, virtual and in-person “Cyber Hackathon” event at our Falls Church headquarters. GDIT President, Amy Gilliland delivered opening remarks about the criticality of cybersecurity in today’s climate and the importance of continuous training and upskilling of the cyber workforce – precisely what the event was designed to do.

The competition brought together 24 teams of cyber professionals, including GDIT staff, customers, and partners, to practice their collective investigation and analysis skills. Teams completed exercises designed to enhance our knowledge of defense cyber operations in critical capabilities like SIEM, SOAR, and XDR. Teams also used sophisticated cyber and AI capabilities to detect and prevent cyber incidents using CrowdStrike and Splunk’s industry-leading cybersecurity platforms.

They used Splunk’s Security platform to perform in a Boss of the SOC (BOTS) competition. BOTS is a blue-team, jeopardy-style, capture-the-flag-esque activity where participants analyze a series of real-world security incidents that security analysts face regularly and earn points based on how quickly they completed each scenario.

The teams also leveraged CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform for various identity protection, endpoint protection, and cloud-native application protection scenarios to learn how to actively hunt threats and protect environments against all phases of the attack.

While the event was important for learning, skill refinement and collaboration it was – at its core – a competition! My congratulations to Team Barcelona on their victory and all the teams for their hard work.

The teams are excited to take their enhanced skills and knowledge of modern cybersecurity capabilities back to the government cybersecurity missions they support every day. These events are great ways for customers, staff, and partners CrowdStrike and Splunk, to work together to prepare for future cybersecurity threats. We can’t wait for the next one and are eager to see what future challenges our teams creatively solve!