RangeForce is a unique training platform because it combines an eLearning environment with a cloud-hosted Cyber Range. The hands-on portions of our training modules occur in the cyber range, as do our individual and team security challenges. These exercises deliver objective assessments of individual skills and a team’s ability to communicate and coordinate activities during a cyberattack crisis.

What do these challenges look like?

Individual Challenges 

Individual challenges assess the skills of the learner after they have completed a series of training modules. The challenges cover the subjects learned, including the use of tools, understanding of vulnerabilities, and the ability to recognize and defend against an attack. 

Here are a few examples:

SOC Challenge Bulkhead: This challenge is focused on log monitoring and the mitigation of malicious behavior using the IDS/IPS tool Suricata. In this challenge, the learner uses Suricata to identify malicious traffic and secure an actual transactional website that is under attack.

SOC Challenge Kernel Exploit: Learn to weaponize the iconic “Dirty Cow” exploit. While pen testing a client’s network, you pivot to an older server that seems largely unused. The configuration appears okay, but to be thorough, you want to get to the root. From there, things start to get interesting.

SOC Challenge Back Door: As an IT engineer at a small company, you are alerted that one of your servers is acting strangely. A user continuously logs in via SSH somehow and creates files in the root directory. Find out how this hacker is getting in and close the security hole.

SOC Challenge Grass Hopper: Post security breach, you are tasked with assessing the security of the company servers. Using Nmap, it should not take long to find problems; SNMP misconfigurations and lateral movement start you on your path.

Team Challenges — known as CyberSieges

Team challenges or CyberSieges are large-scale blue team exercises to test the ability of a security team as they work together under a high-stress environment. CyberSieges are complex multi-stage cyberattacks that teams must detect, contain, and defeat. The sieges do not end until a team has patch and updates applications and closed backdoors to lock out the attack. If not done correctly, the attack will start again. The value of completing a CyberSiege lies in the surfacing of weak processes and communications points in the incident response process. Issues surfaced may include what data is shared with whom, how it is shared, and in what order. Teams can learn how feedback from system and application control owners moves back down the incident response process (something most teams have never thought of, let alone practiced), and where critical information collected about the attack resides, as well as who has access to it, and how it is used. Even highly skilled security professionals will struggle in their first CyberSiege exercise as they uncover gaps in their processes. 

RangeForce customers typically undertake one or two CyberSiege exercises per year. Because it is a cloud-hosted cyber range, it can be easily completed by remote teams. RangeForce also has a library of pre-built exercises that are easy to implement.