Cyber warfare arenas around the world

A graduate of the Israeli Defence Forces’ prestigious Intelligence Corps Unit (8200), Ofir Hason while working on the Israel Electric Corporation’s cyberstrategy, identified an opportunity to establish a global network of cyber training facilities. Using his 15 years of experience in the development and characterization of complex applications, products, and critical networks led shareholders, executives and employees to one inevitable destination. They ventured on a journey of creating a new cybersecurity concept from nothing, which, at the time, was not recognized or understood by the market and involved a great deal of initiative and lateral thinking. Today, CYBERGYM has culminated into a global leader in cyber training and qualification solutions for organizations of all sizes from the financial, energy, utilities, educational and governmental sectors.

" the legacy work we did with critical infrastructure organizations, the most intensely attacked sector, like the Israel Electric Corporation, widened our client-base to include finance, insurance, government, and academic clients. "

As soon as CYBERGYM started operating, Ofir realized that it was the customer’s individual needs that must be addressed. He saw this as a leverage for growth. CYBERGYM provides cutting-edge services that are tailored to meet the customer’s core cybersecurity needs: training their people, using their technologies and their policies. In the early days, Ofir was deeply involved in designing and implementing solutions individually with each customer. Crucially, the solution and its implementation ensured the customer’s production or services were not disrupted. Today, CYBERGYM uses a holistic approach, where the customer’s threat model, technologies and security are taken into consideration. “This enables us to create long-term, individually customized solutions together with the customer,” says the steadfast leader.

CYBERGYM offers thorough, intense but concise cyber training and qualifications for organizations of all sizes, utilizing four major vectors; a global network of training facilities, proprietary programs covering training for all technical, engineering, general and executive personnel in the company, their value-added services and continually updated attack database providing a concurrent set of complex cyberattacks, which can be implemented and executed in any of CYBERGYM's Arenas. “Serving the critical infrastructure sector is an integral part of our operations. Our Arenas are made up of three specialized areas, specifically build to train critical infrastructure personnel,” explains Ofir. “The red room is managed by cyber-offense experts, former intelligence officers who launch authentic, real-time cyberattacks against the trainees. The trainees occupy the blue room, where they undergo and combat real attempts to breach their systems. The Arenas contain real utilities and OT infrastructures, so actual, real operational systems are hacked.”

In an instance, while considering potential cyberthreats and possible training solutions, EDP-the third largest electricity production company in the world-decided to establish a CYBERGROUND, a CYBERGYM Cyberwarfare Arena that is owned by the enterprise, with additional customized control centers (NOC, SOC) required to emulate EDP's infrastructure. The Arena has been operational for over three years and is run jointly by a local team and CYBERGYM’s Red Team of offensive cyber experts. Due to its ongoing success, the Arena has been expanded and upgraded twice since its establishment providing training programs for a wide range of EDP’s employees.

For Ofir, research and development in the cyber arena is very important. “We not only see ourselves as suppliers of training programs and cyber Arenas, but also as a lab to test and develop new methodologies against current and emerging cyberattacks,” says Ofir. CYBERGYM’s vision is to build and operate a global network of cyberwarfare and knowledge centers. Over the next two years, CYBERGYM is going to realize this vision with over 15 Arenas in major cities in America, Asia, Europe and Australia. The network enables all Arenas to share knowledge, emerging offensive patterns and best practices. The project is called WCWA, which stands for World Cyber Warfare Arena, and it connects all facilities to one global Arena that is much more than the sum of its parts.