Organizations worldwide face a dangerous shortage of Cyber Warriors with the skills required to defend against cyber terrorism. This urgent situation is made worse by the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that continue to pervade critical IT infrastructures - despite billions of dollars invested in cyber security measures.
Answering these problems requires Internet-scale simulation environments, along with a comprehensive training curriculum and proven methodologies, to develop elite Cyber Warriors and simulate attacks on IT infrastructures. Military commanders, defense contractors, and even commercial analysts such as Gartner refer to these environments as “Cyber Ranges.”
Although Cyber Ranges are a necessity for training Cyber Warriors, in recent years the old approach to building them has been exposed as a costly and futile exercise. Flagship Cyber Range projects relying on that outmoded approach have wasted years and hundreds of millions of dollars merely to study the problem.
After this talk, you will be armed with enough information to go back and realistically build your own Cyber Range and effectively use it to make sure people are ready for the next big thing!
Bob DuCharme is a Principal Professional Services Engineer with Ixia. He was hired by BreakingPoint Systems in May 2012 and Ixia soon acquired BreakingPoint. In this position, Bob has responsibilities for training and professional services for all security related activities for customers of Ixia. Prior to working at Ixia, Bob was employed by Cisco Systems from June 1998 to July 2011. Bob held multiple positions while at Cisco, including training, security services, and working with higher education. Bob provided training for all of Cisco’s security products for thousands of customers and partners. He was a speaker at many industry conferences, including Cisco’s customer conference “Cisco Live” on 5 different occasions. While at Cisco, Bob trained hundreds of higher education professors and instructors on practical implementations of security technology. He also managed a program that donated millions of dollars of Cisco equipment to colleges and universities to enhance their students learning experiences. Bob has worked for the United States Federal Courts at their technical support center in San Antonio TX. He retired from the United States Air Force after serving 17 years in various roles.