According to CIO magazine, about 96% of organizations use cloud services in one way or another. In partnership with Microsoft, we are proud to announce that Circadence has redesigned its Project Ares cyber learning platform to fully leverage a cloud-native design on Microsoft Azure. This new, flexible architecture improves cyber training to be even more customized, scalable, accessible, and relevant for today’s professionals.
This transition to cloud infrastructure will yield immediate impacts to our current customers.
- Increased speeds to launch cyber learning battle rooms and missions
- Greater ability to onboard more trainees to the system from virtually any location
- More access to cyber training content that suits their security needs and professional development interests
Proven success at Microsoft Ignite
At the recent Microsoft Ignite conference (November 2019), more than 500 security professionals had the opportunity to use the enhanced platform. Conference participants set up CyberBridge accounts and then played customized battle rooms in Project Ares. Microsoft cloud-based Azure security solutions were integrated into the cloud-based cyber range to provide an immersive “cloud-in-cloud” sandboxed learning experience that realistically aligned to phases of a ransomware attack. The new version of Project Ares sustained weeklong intensive usage while delivering on performance.
So what’s new in the new and improved Project Ares?
Curriculum Access Controls for Tailored Cyber Learning
One of the biggest enhancements for Project Ares clients is that they can now control permissions for training exercises and solution access at the user level. Customer Administrators will use the new CyberBridge management portal to tailor access to Circadence training exercises for individual users or groups of users.
Single-sign-on through CyberBridge enables the alignment of training exercises to individuals based on their unique learning requirements including:
- Cyber skill-building exercises and complex missions within Project Ares for cyber professionals
- Cyber foundation learning with Cyber Essentials tools for the IT team
- Security awareness training with inCyt for general staff
Cyber Essential learning tools and the inCyt game for security awareness will be added to CyberBridge over the next several months. With the capability to pre-select training activities reflective of a company’s overall security strategy, enterprise security managers can call the shots.
“As the administrator, you now choose what curriculum content your team should have. “This provides more flexibility in cyber training for our customers in terms of what they can expose to their teams.” ~ Rajani Kutty, Senior Product Manager for CyberBridge at Circadence.
Greater Scalability and Performance in Cyber Training
With a cloud-native architecture design, Project Ares can support more simultaneous users on the platform than ever before. Project Ares can now handle over 1,000 concurrent users, a significant improvement over historical capacity of 200-250 concurrent users on the platform. The combination of content access control at the group or individual level and the increased scalability of Project Ares creates a solution that effectively spins up cyber ranges with built-in learning exercises for teams and enterprises of any size. Additionally, this means that no matter where a cyber learner is geographically, they can log on to Project Ares and access training quickly. We see this as similar to the scalability and accessibility of any large global content provider (e.g. Netflix)—in that users who have accounts can log in virtually anywhere in the world at multiple times and access their accounts.
Now that Project Ares can support a greater volume of users on the platform, activities like hosting cyber competitions and events for experts and aspiring security professionals can be done on-demand and at scale.
“We can train more people in cyber than ever before and that is so impactful when we remember the industry’s challenges in workforce gaps and skills deficiencies.” ~ Paul Ellis, Project Ares Senior Product Manager at Circadence
The previous design of Project Ares required placing users in “enclaves” or groups when they signed on to the system to ensure the content within could be loaded quickly without delay. Now, everyone can sign in at any time and have access to learning without loading delays. It doesn’t even matter if multiple people are accessing the same mission or battle room at the same time. Their individual experience loading and playing the exercise won’t be compromised because of increased user activity.
Other performance improvements made to this version of Project Ares include:
- Quicker download speeds of cyber exercises
- Use of less memory on user’s computers, and resulting longer battery life for users, thanks to lower CPU utilization.
- These behind-the-scenes improvements mean that training can happen quicker and learning, faster.
New Cyber Training Content
One new Mission and three new Battle Rooms will be deployed throughout the next few months on this new version of Project Ares.
- Mission 15, Operation Raging Mammoth, showcases how to protect against an Election attack
- Battle Rooms 19 and 20 feature Splunk Enterprise installation, configuration, and fundamentals
- Battle Room 21 teaches Powershell cmdlet (pronounced command-lets) basics
Mission 15 has been developed from many discussions about 2020 election security given past reports of Russian hacktivist groups interfering with the 2016 U.S. election. In Operation Raging Mammoth, users are tasked to monitor voting-related systems. In order to identify anomalies, players must first establish a baseline of normal activity and configurations. Any changes to administrator access or attempt to modify voter registration information must be quickly detected and reported to authorities. Like all Project Ares Missions, the exercise aligns with NIST/NICE work roles, specifically Cyber Defense Analyst, Cyber Defense Incident Responder, Threat/Warning analyst.
Battle Rooms 19 and 20 focuses on using Splunk software to assist IT and security teams to get the most out of their security tools by enabling log aggregation of event data from across an environment into a single repository of critical security insights. Teaching cyber pros how to configure and use this tool helps them identify issues faster so they can resolve them more efficiently to stop threats and attacks.
Battle Room 21 teaches cmdlet lightweight commands used in PowerShell. PowerShell is a command-line (CLI) scripting language developed by Microsoft to simplify automation and configuration management, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. With PowerShell, network analysts can obtain all the information they need to solve problems they detect in an environment. Microsoft notes that PowerShell also makes learning other programming languages like C# easier .
Embracing Cloud Capabilities for Continual Cyber Training
Circadence embraces all the capabilities the cloud provides and is pleased to launch the latest version of Project Ares that furthers our vision to provide sustainable, scalable, adaptable cyber training and learning opportunities to professionals so they can combat evolving threats in their workplace and in their personal lives.
As this upward trend in cloud utilization becomes ever-more prevalent, security teams of all sizes need to adapt their strategies to acknowledge the adoption of the cloud and train persistently in Project Ares. You can bet that as more people convene in the cloud, malicious hackers are not far behind them, looking for ways to exploit it. By continually innovating in Project Ares, we hope professionals all over the globe can better manage their networks in the cloud and protect them from attackers.
