After organizing hundreds of cybersecurity exercises all over the world, our team at CybExer Technologies has noticed that building confidence in an organization’s security posture is one of the biggest challenges that CISOs and other executives face in today’s digital landscape.
“State of Enterprise Security Posture Report 2020” states that 64% of organizations claim to lack confidence in their security posture, which is driven by inadequate visibility.
While there are many products that offer testing environments, we see that the problem is much deeper – companies need to ensure that their employees have enough training to face potential upcoming cyber threats and attacks.
That’s where Cyber Ranges come in handy. There are many use cases where organizations can utilize this technology. In this article, we will discuss all the best cyber range use cases that can help boost your organization’s cyber resilience.
What Is a Cyber Range & Why Is It Important for Organizations?
Cyber range is a technology that helps companies and organizations train cybersecurity professionals in a safe and simulated environment, helping them boost their cyber resilience and be ready for potential threats and attacks.
Testing employees’ incident response capabilities and improving the company’s overall cyber posture are increasingly relevant in today’s ever-evolving digital world. That’s why the simulated network infrastructure and systems that cyber ranges offer are essential for organizations to build their team’s confidence and ensure a high level of security.
Generally, cyber ranges feature a virtualization layer, which gives them the ability to virtualize any kind of environment and help exercise participants practice their skills in an advanced environment.
That said, the best cyber range use case is in promoting cybersecurity awareness and educating employees to ensure organizational safety and boost overall cyber resilience.
According to the research, a staggering 74% of breaches involved the human element. The source claims that these breaches include social engineering attacks, errors, and misuse – these are the elements that can be avoided by properly training and educating the workforce on this topic.
This shows how important it is for organizations to implement cyber range technology into their operations and improve their security processes through this technology.
What Are the Best Cyber Range Use Cases?
Organizations worldwide use cyber range technology in various ways, as it helps them efficiently train their cybersecurity staff, run live team exercises, and assess skill level within their team, just to name a few.
Let’s have a look at the best cyber range use cases that have proven to provide immense value for companies and organizations worldwide:
Skills Testing
One of the best cyber range use cases is in fostering cybersecurity education, training, and certification. This use case gives organizations the following benefits:
- Organization’s cyber readiness assessment in realistic attack scenarios to identify areas of development.
- Hands-on practice approach to improve team collaboration skills in a simulated environment.
- Skills development on an individual level for employees.
- Effectiveness measurements of a company’s cyber training efforts.
- More streamlines research & technology testing.
Skills testing provides training, education, and internal certification services for cybersecurity professionals.
In this case, participants perform tasks in a real-world environment with different objectives in mind. The focus of this exercise is within a Professional Development Plan (PDP), which ensures clear objectives and pathways for participants to follow throughout the process.
Skills Testing is based on the United States National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), which is the most prominent cyber workforce standard globally.
Technical Exercises
Cyber ranges include different types of technical exercises that organizations can use to train their employees and increase readiness levels for potential cyber threats and attacks.
Organizations choose their appropriate technical exercises based on the needs and objectives they have at a given moment. For example, they might need to address the skills gap in the cybersecurity field, conduct an audit, or optimize costs – identifying these objectives helps them understand which exercise they need to conduct.
A list of cybersecurity technical exercises include:
- Live-fire exercise: This is used to simulate and practice defending against real-world cyber attacks. Through Live-fire exercises, the entire team works together and practices their technical skills in responding to cyber attacks rapidly and effectively.This exercise aims to give the participants a realistic training experience in defending IT systems under intense cyber-attacks.
- Threat hunting exercise: In this case, a team of cybersecurity experts come together in a simulated environment to find and stop threats with a collaborative effort.The main benefit of a threat-hunting exercise is that it assists cybersecurity teams in practicing their skills and learning how to collaborate and use various tools to hunt threats. It also helps with making accurate decisions in a timely manner.This exercise aims to improve the overall team’s ability to respond to real-world cyber threats. The main layers of threat hunting exercise include planning, preparation, execution, response, analysis, and reporting.
- Capture-the-Flag exercise: This competition-style technical exercise challenges participants to find and exploit computer systems’ vulnerabilities and “capture the flag.” Flag, in this case, refers to a specific piece of data or code hidden within the system.The goal is to provide a realistic and challenging environment that motivates participants to improve, develop, and refine their skills in a controlled environment.
Testing New Technologies
When we talk about the best cyber range use cases, it is important to note that this technology is not only useful when training employees and addressing the skills gap, but it also brings a lot of value when testing new technologies and assuring their quality.
If you have an idea for improving your company’s security efforts, then cyber range is a perfect place to test and validate it with high confidence.
How does it work?
Simulated cyber response technology enables managers to assess new technologies by testing them in real-world scenarios and making decisions based on the performances that this piece of technology shows.
Generally, this kind of simulation is a low-risk and low-cost strategy to validate new ideas and identify areas for improvement. This way, decision-makers can efficiently make assumptions and move forward with ideas that pass different scenarios in a cyber range technology.
Security Process Optimization
Another important use case where cyber ranges bring a lot of convenience is helping different organizations optimize their technology stack and security processes.
We all know how challenging it can be to validate the security stack at times. However, cyber ranges allow you to test, adjust, and validate your existing incident response plans successfully. This can be crucial for any organization out there adjusting its processes with an increasing number of cyber threats and attacks.
It is important to look out for different metrics when optimizing your security processes. For example, you can test what are the responses from the team when incident direction systems trigger and how quickly the risk prevention processes start.
This way, companies have an opportunity to modify settings and test how their attack surface responds with the help of cyber ranges.
Real-Life Examples of the Best Cyber Range Use Cases
To get a better understanding of how cyber range technology can benefit your organization, let’s take a look at some of the real-life examples from CybExer Technologies, where the hands-on training approach has proved to be extremely useful.
Army Cyber Spartan 23
CybExer Technologies has organized the Army Cyber Spartan 23 cybersecurity exercise together with the British Army to help participants improve their security posture by going through different realistic cyber attack scenarios through a Live-Fire format.
320 participants from 6 different nations took part in this cybersecurity exercise. It offered a range of progressive challenges, which assisted participants to gain hands-on experience and a better understanding of how to respond to sophisticated cyber attacks.
Live Fire format allowed participants to work together as teams and practice their technical skills, emphasizing their abilities to overcome challenges rapidly and effectively.
Take a look at this article to see a full overview of this exercise.
Boosting Cyber Resilience of Moldova’s Ministry of Defense
In collaboration with e-Governance Academy, CybExer Technologies conducted an EU-supported cybersecurity exercise in November 2023 for Moldova’s Ministry of Defense cyber professionals to enhance their skills and boost their cyber resilience.
This exercise brought together 29 members of the Armed Forces of Moldova with the clear goal in mind – to equip the Moldovan military with the necessary skills and knowledge to detect, prevent, and respond to potential cyber threats and attacks.
Take a look at this article to see a full overview of this exercise.
Defence Cyber Marvel 3
Another successful use case of cyber range exercise is Defence Cyber Marvel 3, which took place around the world but was controlled from Tallinn, Estonia.
Imagine an exercise with 1100+ participants from 90 different countries (many, but not all military) forming 41 teams to enhance their cyber capabilities through various cyber challenges and simulated attacks.
This 6-day-long cybersecurity exercise hosted participants from 19 different countries. CybExer Technologies, in collaboration with CR14, made a significant contribution to designing, building, and executing this exercise on both – a technical and conceptual level.
Take a look at this article to see a full overview of this exercise.
CybExer Technologies – Leading the Way to Cyber Excellence
In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, it is important to get the most out of the technology and utilize the best cyber range use cases to improve your organization’s security posture. The significance of Cyber Range Platforms cannot be overstated in this case – Companies must embrace innovative solutions to empower their teams.
CybExer Technologies has been a driving force in the cybersecurity landscape since 2016. Our advanced cyber range platform assists enterprises with comprehensive cybersecurity training modules designed to elevate their readiness against potential threats.
If you’d like to learn more about our offering and products, feel free to schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.
