Pre-assessing Cyber Range-Based Event Participants’ Needs and Objectives
Päijänen, Jani (2023)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2023121437227
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2023121437227
Tiivistelmä
Cyber arena and cyber range-based cyber exercises and trainings are widely considered beneficial for learners; technical cyber security is best learnt hands-on. In addition to technical Information and Communication technology (ICT) and cyber security experts, organisations’ other roles can benefit participating to an exercise. The technical platforms have been applied to bridge the skills gap in cybersecurity, both full-time technical ICT and cyber security professionals, and those needed cyber security knowledge, skills and understanding in their daily work.
To understand what cyber range-based exercise and cyber lab-based capture the flag (CTF) participants prefer, a pre-exercise survey was conducted. It was also evaluated, if the used survey can be utilized to ac-quire areas of interest from the participants and know their backgrounds better, to plan and develop exercise content and answer to participants' needs. The survey and the research were documented in the article “Participants Prefer Technical Hands-on Cyber Exercises Instead of Organisational and Societal Ones” by Päijänen et al. (2023).
The survey results indicate that participants prefer technical contents over non-technical, although non-technical contents were reported too. Due the setup of the survey, potential bias was recognised and therefore more research is needed. The evaluation indicated that the survey itself can be used to get needs and wishes from exercise participants, which in turn can help exercise planner to provide highly valuable cyber range-based exercises. Information gathering from databases was performed to reach the research objectives. However, the data about participant’s needs prior an exercise, turned out be thin, at least per used databases and search terms. More research is needed to understand state of the art in end-user, or customer, understanding what comes to cyber security exercises.
Porter’s (1991) theories of value chain and value system was sup-posed to be used to map participants and their needs of exercise contents. Due the low number of included research articles, maturity of the mapping could not have been higher.
To understand what cyber range-based exercise and cyber lab-based capture the flag (CTF) participants prefer, a pre-exercise survey was conducted. It was also evaluated, if the used survey can be utilized to ac-quire areas of interest from the participants and know their backgrounds better, to plan and develop exercise content and answer to participants' needs. The survey and the research were documented in the article “Participants Prefer Technical Hands-on Cyber Exercises Instead of Organisational and Societal Ones” by Päijänen et al. (2023).
The survey results indicate that participants prefer technical contents over non-technical, although non-technical contents were reported too. Due the setup of the survey, potential bias was recognised and therefore more research is needed. The evaluation indicated that the survey itself can be used to get needs and wishes from exercise participants, which in turn can help exercise planner to provide highly valuable cyber range-based exercises. Information gathering from databases was performed to reach the research objectives. However, the data about participant’s needs prior an exercise, turned out be thin, at least per used databases and search terms. More research is needed to understand state of the art in end-user, or customer, understanding what comes to cyber security exercises.
Porter’s (1991) theories of value chain and value system was sup-posed to be used to map participants and their needs of exercise contents. Due the low number of included research articles, maturity of the mapping could not have been higher.