Build Your Internal Cyber AcademyUsing Cyberbit Range
The global cyber skills crisis has only widened over the course of the year, with over 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remainingunfilled in the US alone according to Cyberseek. Globally, the crisis only worsens with over 4 million open jobs remainingunfilled according to (ISC)2. The global skills crisis has already begun to affect SOC teams with 74% of cybersecurityprofessionals feeling that their organization has been impacted by a shortage of skilled analysts according to ISSA. As wecontinue to scale business operations, the need for more skilled cybersecurity professionals is only going to grow. It fallsto organizations to develop their own talent rather than search for the “unicorn” candidate with slews of certifications (likeCISSP, CompTIAPenTest+, CySA+, CASP+, CEH, CISSP and CISM), long tenures in the industry (10+ or, in some cases,20+ years of experience, longer than most relevant technology has been around), and specialized skills in not one, butseveral, tech stacks and disciplines. Cyberbit Range is key in taking novices from “zero to hero” in a time efficient manner,
ensuring that your SOC is prepared for any attack.
Learn Using the Right Methodology
To ensure that your new, inexperienced, and untestedcybersecurity hopefuls can gain the right skills for yourSOC as quickly as possible, it is best to prepare themusing the most advanced educational technologies.Cognitive modeling has shown us that using “buildingblocks” for learning and education leads to vastlysuperior knowledge retention and habit-formingbehaviors. In layman’s terms, learn individual skills andthen bring them together in a realistic environment. Inmath, you may recognize this as the multiplication table,beginning small and evolving to more complex equationsas simpler skills are mastered. The same theory appliesto language processing, sports, and a myriad of learnedbehaviors. For cybersecurity, this means practicing simpleskills before moving to more complex attack simulations.
Build Your Internal Cyber Academy with Cyberbit Range
Instructing, Cross Skills Development or Upskilling new cybersecurity candidates, IT Teams, NOC Teams, and othercandidates with the right skills can be a daunting and time-consuming process. However, with Cyberbit Range, building an internal cyber academy is achievable with minimal extra resources required.
Cyberbit Range is the only cybersecurity learning platform that provides all four elements of an effective skills building program, built on the theories behind educational cognitive modeling:
•Build Foundational Elements with Theoretical Labs
•Enhance Cybersecurity Skills Learning & Practice with Practical Labs
•Apply Cybersecurity Skills Against a Real-World Attack
•Automated Assessment and Feedback
Content on Cyberbit Range is updated constantly to ensure that your analysts are preparing for the most relevant andrecent threat vectors. The above approach has been proven to reduce skills development time by up to 66% and improveincident response time by as much as 26%.
Preparing for Specific Roles
Cyberbit Range integrates the NICE Cybersecurity Framework to ensure that SOC Team membersare spending their time practicing for their specific role inside the SOC as outlined by NICE. Careerpaths included with Cyberbit Range align to specific KSAs associated with each individual role.
Each path includes a development process associated with specific theoretical labs, practical
labs, and real-world attacks to ensure that your cybersecurity novice is prepared to join your SOCand contribute to the operational capacity required for their specific work role. Managers trackemployee and novice progress to ensure that employees and novices alike are prepared for therole they are filling in the SOC. For existing employees, progress tracking also allows management to determine who is ready to be promoted given their experience and skill level.
Practicing with Industry Best Practices and Standards
Cyberbit Range ensures your analysts are practicing to respond according to the NIST IncidentResponse Framework. Preparing your team to use the same incident response framework ensuresthat your team is practicing with the same response path. Rehearsing to respond the same way willreduce miscommunications during incident response, ensure your team understands what the role ofother team members are, and ensure that members of your SOC team can fill in for team membersif required. Providing existing and future SOC team members with valuable experience should be a core focus of your internal cyber academy. Measuring the experience that your team has withattacker behavior will allow you to assign the appropriate person to deal with relevant incidents. Toensure that you have enough coverage of attacker behaviors, Cyberbit Range is aligned with MITREATT&CK enterprise. Based on your assigned learning sessions, Cyberbit Range will automaticallytrack which SOC Team members have experience with specified attacker behaviors, providing you with the required information to assign the right analyst to the right incident.
Learn with the Right Tools
The tools your team uses in your security operations center are not open source, unless open source has become theindustry standard. Cyberbit Range contains a variety of commercial grade tools (Firewalls, SIEMs, etc.) from top-tiercybersecurity technology providers including Checkpoint, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, IBM and more. Practicing usingindustry standard technology will ensure that your team is familiar with the tools and features used daily inside your SOC.Additionally, learning on commercial grade tools will allow you to test different tool types to see which tools your teamperforms best with, further improving time to response.
Develop Critical Soft Skills
Cyberbit Range is the perfect environment to assess and develop critical soft skills for your team to be successful in the realworld. Experiencing the pressure of a real-world attack will expose your team to pressure, forcing them to display their softskills in a critical situation. During these sessions you will see your cybersecurity novices and SOC analysts display leadershipskills, see how well they communicate under pressure, determine who can analyze large amounts of data rapidly, and whocollapses under the pressure. With this information you can either improve soft skills where required or identify team memberswho are ready for promotion to team leaders.
Instruct for Performance
To ensure that your analysts and team improve, you must provide constructive feedback. Let them know where they havemissed important steps in attack investigation and mitigation, where they can improve their intra-team communication, andwhere they are lacking the required knowledge to build a skill. Using the information relayed during a learning session, nextlearning steps become clear.
Cyberbit Range includes a complete debriefing suite, providing critical feedback to analysts. Included in the dashboard aregoals and milestones achieved based on the NIST Incident Response Framework, Time to Response measurement, whereanalysts required hints, and how they performed in post exercise quizzes. Each point of measured data included in thedebriefing suite has a directly correlated action, allowing you to focus instruction on problem areas and transforming theaforementioned areas into strengths.
