Cyber Range Training: Understanding the basics

Cybersecurity is one of the integral parts of an organizational framework. The more security-savvy a company's workforce is, the better are the chances to design and implement security strategy both today and tomorrow. And for this the team must be well skilled at detecting and responding to the latest cyber threats. However, in reality, a huge gap exists in cybersecurity based skills.

Besides, most of the companies lack proper funding to train new Security Operations Center (SOC) team. And even if a company has a cybersecurity team, the team members may lack advanced skills in areas like security analytics or forensic investigations, thus putting an additional burden of company to accommodate this deficit. Meanwhile, with rising cyberattacks, it is essential that employees are up-to-date with modern cybersecurity practices. According to recent studies by Cybersecurity Ventures and Verizon, cybercrime will have cost US$6 trillion in worldwide damages by 2021. Protecting enterprise resources is no longer about installing anti-virus softwares, employees must be prepared and proactive. Therefore the one stop panacea to these issues: cyber range.

A cyber range is basically a virtual environment that is used for cybersecurity training and development. It allows a trainee to model IT/OT systems built up of several machines and simulate realistic scenarios including real cyber threats. It is an exciting, immersive and fun way to effectively train an organization's front-line people. The key objective behind these training sessions is to help IT professionals gain hands on cyber skills within a secure realistic environment. While earlier cybersecurity training programmes were offered mainly to IT professionals of SOC team, anyone can avail cyber range training and simulation programmes to learn about tackling cyberattacks, maintaining and building protocols around a remote workforce and more.

Circadence.com, reveals that active learning helps improve team-collaboration, enhances practical knowledge about application of real-world exercises, thus improving memory retention rates to 75%, compared to 5% through traditional learning method. This is also why providing training via real-life simulations in cyber range also proves effective as it will enable participants to visualize how these threats occur in real-life (e.g. ransomware, man-in-the-middle, SQL injection, and DDoS) and respond to them in a simulated environment, by experimenting with various strategies.

Further, since there is no limit on the number of time one can undertake cyber range training, participants can commit practicing to improve their expertise and gain thorough hands-on experience so that they are ready to respond when a threat occurs. It will also augment their reasoning and analytical skills as they understand how to detect, assess, and respond to an actual cyberthreat based on their interactive hyper-realistic cyber range training. Moreover, these training events help build resiliency and agility too. Also, since these trainings are repeatable, in case if anything goes wrong with the cyber range environment, it can be quickly and easily reset or recreated so that trainees can continue their practice.

At the end of the training, cyber range participants receive a certificate of attendance according to the levels and types of courses they complete. The levels and types like entry-level or specialized, single or multi-stage attacks, are selected from catalogue provided by cyber ranger vendor. Trainees can also request for full-fledged advanced assessments to review performance and assess skill levels. In addition to that one also receives expert feedback from security leaders and specialists with decades of experience in real-world response and threat intelligence. This provides the opportunity to benchmark an organization against the most mature firms and perform a gap analysis on opportunities. Apart from businesses, cyber range is also offered at military and government agencies and private seminars too.

To surmise, business organizations can opt for cyber range training to evaluate their cyber capability, test new procedures, select new hires, train their team about ways to counter cyberattacks virtually, before they are introduced to face real cyber threats. The experience and knowledge gained at cyber range training can help security leaders to devise strategies for urgent action, workforce succession, technological improvements and more.