Indra, in collaboration with the UPM’s (Technical University of Madrid for its Spanish initials) School of Telecommunications Engineering, within the framework of the Indra University-Industry Chair and the UPM’s master’s course in Cybersecurity, tested the capabilities of the new generation of cyber-defense experts.
The students recently faced some of the challenges that can be encountered in the event that a terrorist group or an enemy country tried to attack companies or basic services in their country through cyberspace.
The attendees faced these challenges in an environment of the utmost realism, made possible by the Indra Cyber Range platform.
This is the very same field of operations that experts of the Joint Cyber-Defence Command, NATO and several European and Ibero-American armies, as well as EU police forces, have used for their training.
Within this field of operations, the students from Telecommunications Technologies and Services Engineering and from the University Master’s course in Telecommunications Engineering carried out an exercise in forensic analysis, in which they had to investigate an attack and collect all possible evidence.
As for the students of the Cybersecurity Master’s course, they carried out a penetration or black box pentesting training to identify the vulnerabilities of a network and another one on steganography or detection of hidden information in digital files.
The completed tests on Cyber Range allowed future professionals to measure the degree to which they have mastered the theoretical knowledge. Indra’s platform incorporates gamification techniques to promote competitiveness. It also speeds up learning by adapting the test to the level of each participant.
The students connected with their own computer to the platform that is hosted in the cloud, in the Indra Data Processing Center, which is located in a building equipped with maximum security measures and complies with NATO standards.
The use of state-of-the-art smart tools such as Cyber Range is the only possible way to train, in time, the huge number of cyber-experts that will be needed in the coming years. It is estimated that in 2022, Europe will have a shortfall of 350,000 specialists, a figure that will soar to 1.5 million professionals all over the world. Having them is vital for the security of countries and for the development of economies, which are becoming increasingly digitalized and interconnected.
