Army Cyber Praetorian is a high-fidelity training exercise designed to assess and validate the capabilities of the British Army’s advanced cyber defenders. Unlike Army Cyber Spartan, which assesses tactical cyber defenders, this exercise focuses on the higher-level teams operating in the Army’s Cyber Information Services Operations Centre (Army CyISOC). They are responsible for the day-to-day defence of the Army’s entire enterprise, across both information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT).
What the exercise assesses
Over five days, participating force elements (teams) are assessed against training objectives based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). The objectives are translated into tasks and grouped into task families. This reflects how a security operations centre (SOC) handles an incident: several, sometimes all, CSF functions may be in play at once rather than operating sequentially or in isolation. The British Army usually opens the exercise to other elements of the UK Defence cyber ecosystem (other CyISOCs), sharing the training opportunity more widely across Defence.
The live-fire format
In Army Cyber Praetorian, teams defend running systems against a sophisticated opposing force (OPFOR), also known as the Red Team, while managing concurrent incidents and assessment tasks. The exercise assesses not only what teams can do but how mature their capabilities and ways of working are, so they face recurring waves of task families. The format is deliberately designed to place teams and individuals under cognitive overload, reflecting the workload faced by SOCs in Defence and the civilian sector. Throughout, the Red Team delivers an attack campaign informed by the tactics, techniques and procedures of selected advanced persistent threats (APTs). Cyber threat intelligence is therefore an important part of the exercise.
CybExer’s role
Those being assessed are among the Army's most experienced at running cyber exercises. As they cannot both deliver Army Cyber Praetorian and be assessed through it, CybExer takes on much of the delivery: creating and maintaining the exercise environment and providing the Red Team OPFOR. That leaves Army personnel free to take part in full.The Cyber Range Platform is hosted on the Army’s own range infrastructure, allowing systems to be faithfully recreated at scale. CybExer’s award-winning Integrated Scoring and Awareness (ISA) tool maps progress against the agreed training objectives in real time and provides granular detail on individual as well as team performance. ISA also maps the Red Team attack campaign. CybExer embeds its own specialists within the Army’s assessment team to ensure that all required data is captured and analysed against the agreed exercise objectives.
Why the exercise is run
Army Cyber Praetorian gives the Army a granular assessment of the Army CyISOC’s ability to defend its critical digital assets. It allows individuals to operate and function as teams in a demanding environment and at a realistic tempo, on a range that removes any need to expose real systems.
