Would You Like to Learn More?
Schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization's needs.
How well is your organization prepared to respond to a cyber attack? According to the study, only 23% of organizations worldwide have consistently applied a cybersecurity response plan, and even fewer companies are sure if their playbooks can perform well.
Cybersecurity skills can’t be taught overnight, but there is a solution that can effectively help organizations increase their level of preparedness for potential cyber threats and attacks through the power of a Cyber Range.
In this article, we dive deep into this topic and talk about what is a cyber range, why they are important, and the benefits of utilizing this technology to ensure your organization’s security.
What Is a Cyber Range?
Simply put, the cyber range is a simulated environment that organizations use to train cybersecurity professionals and test their incident response capabilities. Typically, cyber ranges include simulated network infrastructure, tools, and systems, which help organizations prepare for any kind of cyber threat or attack.
The goal of a cyber range is to provide a safe environment and assist organizations in gaining hands-on cyber skills for security posture testing.
The majority of cyber ranges feature a virtualization layer, as well as network and computing infrastructure. Cyber ranges also have the ability to virtualize any kind of environment, helping participants to practice their skills in a more advanced environment.
One of the biggest benefits of a cyber range is that they are interactive, simulated platforms and representations of networks, systems, and applications. They play a major role in fostering cybersecurity education, training, and certification.
Why Are Cyber Ranges Important?
Cyber ranges are important because they offer several use cases and advantages for different kinds of organizations all over the world. This technology can help them train and test their existing team to assess the cyber readiness of their organization, build an internal team for a large enterprise, and develop the upcoming generation of cybersecurity talent in the most sophisticated way.
Different use cases for a cyber range technology include:
Learning Experience in a Safe Environment
One of the most useful features of a cyber range is that it provides a highly controlled virtual environment where organizations can reuse and replicate training modules at any time they want without having a major impact on their live networks and systems.
This means that your organization’s team members can experiment and learn how to leverage new tools to improve their skill set. Having this kind of flexibility results in more hands-on training programs and an increased level of understanding among the team.
Besides, cyber ranges usually provide ready-made frameworks such as the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) framework, which provides a set of building blocks for describing the needed tasks and skills for individuals and teams to perform cybersecurity work.
Team Assessment on Their Cybersecurity Skills
A cyber range is also a great tool to train and assess the skills of your employees. It can help you understand the level of your team’s knowledge and address skills development needs if necessary.
At the same time, you can use it to assess your potential hires as well. These exercises can help you make sure that they have the proper knowledge and experience to tackle real cybersecurity challenges at work.
Place for Team to Collaborate and Learn From Each Other
Cyber ranges allow organizations to practice their team’s collaboration skills in simulated cyberattack scenarios. It is an ideal environment for your team members to practice their individual skills in a team setting.
Cybersecurity should be a collaborative effort, and these kinds of exercises can help to raise awareness of this among the members of your organization.
It is important to remember that a cyber range consists of different scenarios that can be quite competitive. This allows exercise participants to practice as a team and get ready to handle real-life cyber attacks and incidents.
Benefits of Using a Cyber Range to Ensure the Security of Your Organization
There are several benefits for organizations to use cyber range technology and prepare for cyber threats with this framework. Some of the most notable ones include:
Increase Readiness of Your Organization
The cyber range can help organizations increase their overall enterprise readiness for any kind of potential cyber threats or attacks. Every single employee can play an important role in maintaining a company’s high cybersecurity level. Therefore, skills employees develop through cyber ranges can be crucial for any kind of organization to develop a proper process for responding to cyber incidents.
Other than that, with the help of cyber range, company executives have an opportunity to practice how to make key technical decisions to benefit their organization in the long run. This improves the overall coordination process, making the company ready to overcome potential cyber challenges.
Organize Live Exercises for the Team
Companies can also use cyber ranges to run live team exercises. This approach lets a group of participants from an organization come together and practice working on a cyber incident as a team.
For example, a Red vs Blue team exercise, where a defending blue team is against an attacking red team, could help practice different skills in automated attack scenarios.
Better Optimize Security Processes
Another benefit that cyber range can bring is better optimization of an organization’s security processes and technology stack.
Security stack validation can be challenging at times. Verifying them with cyber ranges allows you to test and adjust different processes, such as incident response plans, helping you to create a solid security readiness for your organization.
Recreate Different Attack Scenarios
Cyber range technology allows organizations to replicate and recreate different attack scenarios. It can be very useful to stimulate different scenarios your company infrastructure can face.
During the simulation, responsible people can practice their incident response playbooks and test the effectiveness of their reactions when facing a cyber threat. This can help the team apply learnings in the process and adjust protocols to improve the overall process.
What Kinds of Organizations Need a Cyber Range?
Generally, government and military organizations were the ones who utilized the power of cyber ranges to imitate real-world scenarios and train themselves for effective responses against potential cyber-attacks.
However, as the world became more digital and cyber threats grew in frequency, a broad range of businesses are now using a cyber range to train their staff and prepare them for upcoming challenges.
The most common cases people utilize cyber ranges are the following:
- Educators implementing cybersecurity education courses into their curricula.
- Organizations who want to train for security operations and analysis.
- Organizations seeking to evaluate candidates for their cybersecurity positions.
- Individuals looking to train their skills and join the cybersecurity workforce.
- Organizations testing new products and software releases.
What Types of Cyber Range Exercises Are There?
Cyber range technology offers a lot to organizations who want to improve their cyber preparedness. It is important to keep in mind that when it comes to improving your security posture, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
That’s why there are different types of cyber exercises that fit specific needs that a particular organization might have. Let’s have a look at some of them:
- Live Fire Exercise is specifically designed to assist cybersecurity professionals in simulating and practicing defending against real-world cyber threats and attacks.
It comes with technical Red vs Blue exercise elements, and its primary objective is to provide a realistic experience and give them a real taste of what defending IT systems under intense attack looks like. - Threat Hunting Exercise is a type of cybersecurity activity where a team of experts comes together in a simulated environment to find and stop pre-planned cyber threats with a collaborative effort.
Think of it as a process of detectives searching for clues in a crime scene. In this case, a team of cybersecurity professionals is looking for clues like computer viruses or actions from hackers trying to steal important information. - Capture-the-Flag Exercise refers to a competition where participants have to find and exploit computer system vulnerabilities to “capture” these specific problems, which can be a piece of data or a code hidden within the system.
This exercise generally involves multiple teams who compete and try to capture as many flags as possible within a specific period of time. Teams are on a mission to work together and execute strategies to achieve goals.
To get more in-depth information about the benefits and processes behind each one of these cybersecurity exercises, have a look at the full guide on our blog.
What Are the Most Common Use Cases of Cyber Range Technology?
Cyber Range technology has proved to be useful in different industries and verticals. As cyber threats continue to evolve, no industry is safe from harmful attacks.
Effective solution for this problem? Continuous cyber training and familiarizing the team with attack scenarios in a realistic setup are what will help your organization enhance cyber preparedness and improve security posture.
Let’s take a look at some of the industries where the existence of realistic cyber training solutions is essential for enhancing the resilience of organizations working in these fields:
Space Cyber Range
Our everyday lives become increasingly dependent on space-based technologies like satellites and other critical infrastructure units. This kind of dependence causes the exponential growth of the overall industry, which is estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2040.
However, there is a massive challenge associated with the given growth, which is all about understanding how to approach cybersecurity in space and what the related risks are.
It is important to have a system and process in place to test and validate the space-based assets before deployment to identify vulnerabilities and ensure the high-level security of deployed solutions.
This is exactly where Space Cyber Range emerges as a solution – it is a perfect tool for organizations to learn all about cybersecurity risks, test and validate their technology, and increase efficiency by optimizing processes along the way.
Take a look at this article to learn more about Space Cyber Range.
Smart City Cyber Range
As we all know, Smart City is a concept that promises an advanced and futuristic life in our cities – improved transportation, less pollution, enhanced security, and well-built infrastructure, just to name a few.
However, governmental organizations and smart city solution providers are under a constant threat of being attacked by hackers, which could lead to massive problems like compromising vital services or data breaches.
In order to avoid these problems, it is important for responsible organizations to think about their cyber preparedness efforts and take action to improve their overall security posture. This is exactly where Smart City Cyber Range can be helpful.
Smart City Cyber Range represents a simulated environment that replicates technologies, systems, and tools used in smart cities to ensure the safety of our projects and help us avoid massive losses and damages.
Simply put, this technology provides a secure and isolated environment where administrators and security experts can safely explore this complex landscape.
Take a look at this article to learn more about Smart City Cyber Range.
Cyber Warfare Training Solutions
We can define a cyber warfare training system as a safe, controlled environment where military organizations have the ability to train their personnel, improve skills in different directions, and get prepared in case Cyber Warfare begins.
The cyber range gives the simulated environment that can accurately mirror real-world networks and hardware, which itself creates a risk-free arena for understanding and practicing army personnel’s incident response and attack abilities.
Besides, a cyber warfare training system helps decision-makers assess their current technologies and understand whether they need to make updates or keep the current system.
At the same time, governments often need to validate and update their cyber warfare policies through practical testing, as well as make rapid decisions under pressure, which is a crucial skill in the dynamic landscape of cyber warfare.
Another important aspect to consider when assessing cyber warfare training solutions is that it is a cost-effective way to effectively train army personnel and enhance their cybersecurity skills without the potential risks associated with real-world scenarios.
Take a look at this article to learn more about the Cyber Warfare Training System.
Cyber Ranges for Academic Purposes
Besides being incredibly useful in other use cases, cyber ranges are also assisting academic organizations in transforming the way they approach teaching cybersecurity.
Cyber ranges have the ability to simulate real-world attack scenarios, which can help learners get their first taste of what the actual cyber attack looks like and understand what are the different techniques to mitigate them in a timely manner.
This approach of creating tailored learning programs that combine your existing course materials with realistic cyber exercises motivates students to be more engaged in the process and improve their cyber resilience along the way.
When it comes to measuring the performance and personal development of student groups, organizations tend to utilize the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework, which cyber ranges also support.
Take a look at this page to learn more about Cyber Ranges for Academia.
How to Choose a Cyber Range?
When thinking about choosing the cyber range partner that fits your organization’s needs, it is important to keep different factors in mind.
Firstly, you should identify the business requirements and think about what the ideal outcome would look like. What should the participants learn and prepare for? Which technologies need to be involved?
After that, you should find a balance between features and capacity. This is the time to think about what are the use cases that you need to have in your cyber range. Depending on that, you will understand whether you need integration with other external systems or not.
Then, you can determine the hosting and licensing model that fits your organization’s capabilities and needs the most. You should consider whether you are looking to invest in a cyber range as a service or an in-house capability.
You should also keep in mind that scalability is the key when it comes to cyber ranges. Generally, cyber ranges use virtualization technology, which can provide an orchestration layer that helps map complex training environments and display them in virtual machines.
After figuring out all these details, you can set the budget and choose the partner that best suits your organization.
How Can CybExer Technologies Help?
At CybExer, we have been at the forefront of driving change and shaping the industry since 2016. We are committed to providing global organizations with advanced Cyber Range technology and helping them prepare to tackle potential cyber challenges in the future.
Our platform offers a wide range of advanced cyber security training modules designed to enhance the cyber capabilities of organizations on a global scale.
If you’d like to learn more about our offering and products, schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.
