Cyber Range is the most unique of the four platform offerings from Cyberbit, a spinoff from the Israeli defense giant Elbit Systems.
Cyber Range training configuration
Cyberbit is announcing improvements to Cyber Range, the company’s cybersecurity training and simulation platform. The major enhancements are the introduction of virtual instructor functionality designed to complement a human instructor, and new training content that adds new attack scenarios and training modes.
Cyberbit is a spin-off of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest defense company, whose head offices are in Israel, and whose North American offices are in Austin, Texas. The Cyber Range platform is one of four platforms that Cyberbit sells, with Endpoint Detection and Response [EDR], SOC Automation and Orchestration, and OT Security for SCADA and ICS networks being the others.
“Cyber Range is our most unique product by far, and can be considered to be our flagship product because of that uniqueness and its market traction and leadership,” said Sharon Rosenman, Cyberbit’s VP of Marketing. “It now has dozens of customers in all categories. Enterprises use it to change the way that they are training. Service providers – both telcos and MSPs – use it to offer training services. We are also working with academia with it, because of the tremendous need to drive cybersecurity education, and it has been introduced into several academic programs.” Academic customers include Regents University in Virginia, Miami Dade College, and the University of Maine at Augusta.
Cyberbit’s strategy is more about preparing organizations for an attack and less in preventing the attack, which is more the realm of network security companies.
“We emphasize the need for security orchestration and automation to take away manual tasks from analysts and free up their time,” Rosenman said. “We are also seeing more convergence in the OT and IT space around this. Organizations are starting to be more aware of the OT space, and understand that they don’t have either the know-how or security tools to give them the ability to monitor the OT network and provide orchestration. We manage the entire attack surface across IT and OT, and are doing an increased amount of business in providing that orchestration around the OT. It’s a fairly unique play that gives us an advantage with those types of companies, so we are referred to MSSPs to integrate those types of solutions.”
Rosenman described Cyberbit’s channel strategy as still maturing.
“We have a hybrid strategy so that we can develop references,” he said. “North America in particular is hybrid and relies a lot on Cyberbit doing the sales processes, while other geos like India are much more channel. But we have a very good product for partners, and with Cyber Range, they can resell the training services. Cyberbit is not a training company. We sell the software and platform, and partners can be the ones who offer the training courses. We have both traditional and MSSP partners who do that.”
The new version of Cyberbit Range adds two major new elements. The first is Virtual Instructor, an AI-powered instructor which assesses trainee performance throughout the incident response process.
“This provides a way to build assessment into the training,” Rosenman said. “Typically, our training is done with an instructor in the room, which we believe is the most effective method. The virtual instructor adds capabilities which automate some of those processes and provides feedback.” It assesses the quality and relevance of evidence collected by the trainee, their progress in detecting, responding and remediating a threat, and, for red teams, their progress in completing their mission.
“This has two major points of impact.” Rosenman said. “It lets the instructor focus on other things, and it also provides great consistency in the way that you train, and is meant to provide very consistent feedback.” The virtual instructor is thus a complement to the human trainer, not an alternative method of training.
The new release also adds over dozen new attack scenarios reflecting the most recent threats, as well as new training modes including capture the flag, war games and freestyle attacks.
“This is the market-leading simulation for training because of the very sophisticated planning of automated attacks, which goes well beyond the traditional Red versus Blue,” Rosenman indicated.
Rosenman, who has been in Canada on a work tour, which today has him speaking at the CyberSmart Summit for cybersecurity training and workforce development in Fredericton New Brunswick, said that there are two main messages for the channel in the new Cyberbit announcement.
“It speaks to the need for a different type of training, and is an opportunity, especially for service providers, to provide that training,” Rosenman said. “Secondly, Cyber Range is about more than just formal training, It is also being used to evaluate new analysts in security teams. We have seen customers do that. It reduces the time needed to onboard a new hire.”
The new Cyberbit Range will be generally available on June 15, 2019.
