Training Solution for Broad Spectrum Cyber Defence
Indra is providing a cyber exercise training and organization service to the Joint Spanish Cyber Defense Command on its CYBER RANGE platform, the company announced on 20 December.
CYBER RANGE is a training solution that offers an environment in which real attacks are replicated in a secure manner.
An agreement signed in April envisages the organization, over the next fifteen months, of exercises based on highly complex scenarios, defined by Joint Cyber Defence Command itself and designed by Indra. The first training took place in October in the framework of the Ibero-American Cyber Defence Forum in Madrid.
Fifty soldiers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Portugal, Mexico and Spain met at Retamares Base, in Madrid, to face a range of exercises that reproduced aggressive attacks with ransomware, botnets and illegitimate network traffic presence. Several simulations were conducted: security operations for organisations that were being extorted, missions to recover sensitive information that had been stolen and response to an attack that aimed to hinder the exercise of the right to vote by electronic means.
More recently, Joint Cyber Defence Command used Indra’s platform to carry out a training course in Ethical Hacking and develop an exercise in Digital Forensics & Digital Response, an event similar to ‘Catch the Flag’. In this case, the attackers had taken control of the servers of a company and demanded the payment of a ransom. The participants learned how to prevent, identify and handle a situation of this type with maximum efficiency.
During the course, system vulnerabilities and possible intrusion techniques were studied. Another topic was analysis of the risks affecting different types of data processing systems and how they can serve as a gateway for third parties.
A further advantage of the Indra platform is that students can connect from anywhere in the world, using their own computer and their preferred web browser. The platform is hosted on the cloud, at Indra’s data processing centre, which has security measures complying with NATO standards. Users connect through a virtual private network or VPN.
In 2017 more than a thousand professionals and experts from all types of civil and military organizations put their cybersecurity and cyber defence skills to the test on the Indra platform. Among its users are the EU Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL), the Portuguese Army and the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute (INCIBE), the Spanish Civil Guard and the Autonomous University of Madrid. More recently, the University of Salamanca also used it in an exercise with the Civil Guard.
Indra brings with this platform an essential technology to address the huge demand for cyber warfare experts that the market will demand in the coming years. It is estimated that, in 2022, Europe will have a deficit of 350,000 specialists in this field, a figure that will rise to 1.5 million professionals worldwide.
