How prepared are you for a cyberattack? Your ability to identify, respond to, and recover from one could make or break your organization. 

Fortunately, there’s a simple way both to measure and improve your preparedness: an incident response simulation in a cyber range.

What is Incident Response Readiness in Cybersecurity?

Incident response readiness is a measure of how effectively your organization can manage and mitigate cybersecurity incidents such as DDoS attacks and ransomware infections. It’s a key part of an organization’s cybersecurity posture, encompassing both planning and resources as well as capabilities.

Effective incident response generally requires:

• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
• Security and vulnerability management tools
• Business continuity and disaster recovery tools
• Playbooks that provide guidance on handling each major type of cyber incident
• Ongoing training and assessments

In addition to serving as a means of educating your employees, a cyber range can help you define key elements of your incident response readiness. 

The Benefits of Cybersecurity Incident Simulations 

Hands-on experience is a great teacher, but you don’t want your people learning by doing while they deal with an ongoing incident. 

Simulations delivered through a virtual cybersecurity lab provide your team with the necessary training to fulfill their roles as effectively as possible in a crisis. Instead of memorizing what your playbooks say on paper, they can actively put them into practice. This, in turn, will teach them what procedures to follow, who to contact, and how to best apply their tools and skills.

Speaking of playbooks, simulations can also help you validate your incident response plan, testing and perfecting your playbooks to ensure they remain effective and up-to-date. There’s also the potential to uncover vulnerabilities or shortcomings that you may not otherwise notice, such as a blind spot in your threat intelligence software or a bottleneck in your communication processes. 

A cyber range also allows you to safely run scenarios that would be generally impossible to simulate in a production environment, such as a ransomware infection. This is valuable for far more than employee education. Cyber ranges can also serve as  sandboxes for both developers and security engineers.

For example, your security team could use a cyber range as a testbed for new security tools, assessing how they interact with your ecosystem before deploying them. They might also perform simulated penetration tests to identify potential gaps in your security. As for developers, they could test how a code change or update impacts stability and reliability. 

Key Features of Effective Crisis Simulation Software

Your goal with a virtual cyber range is to provide realistic, effective cyber exercises that don’t put your production environments at risk. In doing so, you’ll help your employees develop the necessary knowledge and skills to manage any threats they may face. To that end, you’ll want to look for software that offers the following:

• The ability to replicate real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), including emerging threats and zero-day exploits
• Support for a wide range of attack scenarios and situations, alongside extensive customizability
• The capacity to realistically simulate your organization’s real-world infrastructure
• A user-friendly interface that allows for quick deployment and scaling
• Integration with learning management systems and cybersecurity tools
• Alignment with accepted industry frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and NIST
• Support for both synchronous and asynchronous training
• Built-in analytics functionality to track learner progress and training effectiveness
• Automation to streamline scheduling and assessments
• Cloud-based scalability with the capacity to support distributed teams
• Prioritization of data integrity, security, and confidentiality
• Extensive product and technical support from the vendor as necessary