Weekend project by IBM employee and his son: Havyn's cybersecurity virtual assistant

Evan Spicek is the 11 year old son of IBM employee Mike Spicek. One day, the idea to do something together at the weekend came to my son and father. But they did not create another birdhouse. Instead, it was decided to develop a voice assistant like Jarvis from Iron Man. New development was called Havyn. By the principle of operation, it is more like the voice assistant of Amazon, Alexa.

But Havyn does not connect to the cloud with music on demand, instead he is engaged in protecting his owner from various cyber threats. The functions of this helper are quite specific, but that was the choice of Mike and Evan Spicek. Initially, Havyn could only respond to text requests entered from the keyboard. A little later, he was trained to recognize voice requests.

In order to do this, a miniature Raspberry Pi PC with a 7-inch touchscreen was purchased. The total amount of the purchase was not very large, so the decision can be called economical. Then Mike and Evan started looking for a suitable solution on the Bluemix platform (we already talked about some of these solutions). In the list of already developed applications there were several that came up for the current project. In addition, Havyn was hooked up to an IBM cybersecurity platform called the X-Force Exchange.
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“Now we’ve been able to ask questions about cybersecurity and get answers,” says Spaisak.


After several days of testing, a senior member of the developer family caught himself talking to his brainchild every day. Basically, Mike Spicek asks Havyn questions about new cybersecurity threats. Over time, the virtual assistant is improving, as Mike is constantly working with him, adding new and new features. The creators of the service connected the virtual assistant to IBM BigFix, the cloud cybersecurity manager, which not only shows the list of threats to the enterprise network, but also indicates which problem affects the specific system. Havyn even got its own icon - this is the first Watson logo. Avatar was needed for the service so that the developer, in his own words, did not “feel a little crazy talking to a computer.”

Over time, the assistant became so advanced that the developer showed it to his colleagues. Those helped to determine the possible use of Havyn. The main thing is that the assistant should not be considered as a complete replacement for some security measures in the enterprise. Rather, it is an addition to the basic tools.

“There are a number of things that analysts have to do and that take a lot of time,” says Spicek. Thus, cybersecurity staff usually manage several systems at the same time, analyzing a huge amount of information. It may be easier to assign some routine things to a virtual assistant. And without any aids, just talking to him.

It is quite convenient. For example, unlike the example, it is faster to ask the Alexa Assistant Virtual Domestic Assistant to set the timer on any home appliance than to do it yourself.

Ideally, this should be the case with Havyn - you just have to ask, and he will do everything on his own, allowing the user to avoid the routine. Moreover, a cyberplayer can be given more than one task, but several at once - it is multitask and able to perform dozens or even thousands of tasks at the same time. In large companies, information security departments deal with tens or even hundreds of thousands of incidents daily. It is clear that a person is unable to cope with this, even a whole team of specialists will not do anything. But cloud services with cognitive elements do such work without problems.

And if you use Havyn, then with such services you can communicate using voice commands, and not work with textual information and primary data.



The problem here is that no one yet knows how useful a virtual cybersecurity assistant can be. IBM representatives believe that Havyn can become part of hybrid solutions, such as Watson. Now IBM's cognitive system works as an element of a number of third-party services, performing data processing work. The same can be done with Havyn, incorporating it into third-party solutions related to cybersecurity. In general, it is already clear that the virtual cybersecurity assistant has grown from a regular home project, transforming into a large IBM project.