How to Conduct a Cyber Exercise?

Companies and organizations worldwide face an increasing amount of cyber challenges every single day. According to Cybercrime Magazine, in the next 5 years, we will see a 15% increase in cybercrime, and total costs will reach 10.5 trillion by 2025. 

Fortunately, enterprises can prevent this from happening by investing their time and resources into training their staff and improving their cyber resilience with the help of different cyber exercises. 

In this article, we will talk about different kinds of cyber exercises, and how to conduct them with the help of cyber range technology to improve your organization’s security posture. 

Understanding Cyber Ranges and Their Role in Cyber Exercises

Simply put, a cyber range is a platform that enables simulated environments for training cybersecurity professionals and testing an organization’s incident response capabilities. This technology generally includes simulated network infrastructure, systems, and tools, as well as various types of cyber attacks to be played out in a training setting. 

Organizations worldwide use cyber ranges in the following ways:

• Help assess the organization’s cyber readiness in realistic cyber-attack scenarios and identify areas for development
• Improve and practice team collaboration skills in simulated cyber-attack scenarios
• Address individual cyber skills development needs
• Measure the effectiveness of cyber training efforts 

The Advantages of Incorporating Cyber Ranges Into Your Organizations

Cyber ranges are important because they help organizations boost their cyber resilience and make sure they are prepared for any kind of threats and attacks. 

According to the data from Statista, around 71% of businesses were the victims of ransomware attacks in 2022, causing them notable losses and damages. In order to avoid these kinds of losses, it is important to train the team, raise awareness, and be prepared with the help of cyber ranges. 

Using cyber ranges for your organization comes with lots of benefits. Firstly, it is a cost-effective way to train your employees. At the same time, this technology helps you to optimize your company’s security processes, assess the team on their cybersecurity skills, and effectively test new ideas and technology in a safe and controlled environment. 

What Kinds of Cyber Exercises Are There?

CybExer’s cyber range offers a huge variety of different cyber capability development solutions. 

A list of exercises include:

1. Live-Fire Exercise

This exercise helps cybersecurity professionals simulate and practice defending against real-world cyber attacks. Live Fire exercise allows the entire team to work together and practice their technical skills and team spirit in responding to cyber attacks rapidly and effectively. 

With the deep technical elements, the Live Fire exercise is designed for practicing response capabilities to a cyber crisis according to a realistic pre-defined scenario. 

The main goal is to give the participants a realistic training experience in defending IT systems under intense cyber-attacks. 

2. Threat Hunting Exercise

In this exercise, a team of cybersecurity experts work together in a simulated environment to find and stop threats with a collaborative effort. 

Think of it as a process of detectives searching for clues in a crime scene – the cybersecurity team is looking for clues and evidence of suspicious activities, such as detecting computer viruses or hackers attempting to steal information. 

Threat Hunting Exercises are helpful because they assist cybersecurity teams in practicing their skills in the field. They learn how to collaborate effectively, how to use different tools and techniques to hunt for threats, and how to make accurate decisions in a timely manner. 

Most importantly, this exercise helps teams improve their abilities to respond to real-world cyber threats. Different layers of the Threat Hunting Exercise include planning, preparation, execution, response, analysis, and reporting. 

3. Capture-The-Flag Exercise

This is a simulated cybersecurity competition that challenges participants to find and exploit computer system vulnerabilities to “capture the flag.” This “Flag” can be a specific piece of data or code hidden within the system. 

The goal of this exercise is to provide a realistic and challenging cybersecurity experience that helps participants develop and refine their skills in a controlled environment. 

Generally, the CTF exercise involves multiple teams, with several participants in each, who compete against each other to capture as many flags as possible within a specified period of time. 

If you’d like to learn more about each of these cyber range exercises, have a look at our free downloadable material, explaining every single one of CybExer’s cybersecurity exercises in-depth. 

What Challenges Do Cyber Exercises Help You Solve?

Cyber range technology can be helpful on several occasions for companies. Other than being a safe and controlled environment for organizations to test and train their employees in their cybersecurity skills, cyber ranges help reduce the costs of R&D and technology testing significantly, as well as help to discover and communicate the status of your enterprise’s cyber preparedness.

Here are some of the most common challenges that cyber ranges help companies solve:

Organizations can ensure that their employees have the necessary skills to protect against cyber threats and maintain the security of their digital assets by utilizing regular training sessions, such as e-learning courses, individual skills testing, and Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenges. 

That way, employees have convenient and flexible ways to gain knowledge and develop their skills in the cybersecurity field. 

Cyber ranges can assist organizations in auditing and reporting their staff’s cybersecurity skills by providing data and insights on the performance of individual employees and the organization as a whole during training exercises and assessments. 

Using cyber ranges for R&D and technology testing programs can lead to reduced costs, improved efficiency, and faster results for organizations, giving them a high competitive advantage in the market. 

How to Conduct a Cyber Exercise With CybExer Technologies?

Here at CybExer Technologies, we provide comprehensive cyber security training solutions to increase organizational cyber resilience. 

We help organizations worldwide with a huge variety of advanced cyber security training modules designed to enhance their cyber capabilities. With our cutting-edge cyber range, organizations can conduct highly realistic live-fire exercises that simulate real-world cyber attacks. 

In today’s ever-evolving digital world, cybersecurity is becoming more relevant than ever. There is an increased need for cyber range technology from companies operating in different industries. All sorts of entities, from international corporations to governmental organizations, are struggling to find and train their staff to prepare for potential cyber threats and attacks. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization become more cyber-resilient and prepare for potential threats, schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss how our technology can help you address your organization’s needs.