Cyber Ranges: The New Training Era in the Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics World

Abstract

Cybersecurity is one of the prominent global challenges due to a significant increase in the number of cyber-attacks over the last few decades. To protect enterprises, personal data, and productivity and to ensure a safe working environment, cybersecurity awareness is crucial. For the successful prevention and mitigation of sophisticated cyber-attacks and minimization of cyberthreat risks, engagement in training activities is vital. Cyber ranges are environments offering tools and services to support cybersecurity and forensic simulation and training experience. Therefore, the design and development of cyber ranges have become a necessity for many governmental bodies and organizations such as law enforcement and defence agencies. In other words, a cyber range allows the reproduction of IT and/or OT systems execution in a simulated environment (composed by both virtual and physical components). In this way, this chapter highlights the concept of cyber ranges, mainly giving a well-defined overview of them, focusing on two types of stakeholders, LEAs and defence. First, several cyber ranges have been taken into consideration to identify significant attributes as well as categorization based on several properties. Finally, the ambition of the chapter is to provide a projection of the future capabilities and potentials about cyber range design, implementation, and execution of training, targeting the improvement of the involved end-users.