Cyber risks increased enormously in recent years due to rising of terroristic, state sponsored or private cyber criminal organizations. Assessing the nature of a cyber attack needs appropriate technical skills but, at the same time, well estabilished organisational processes. Quite recently, firstly the military sector but subsequently the business and the industrial systems security markets became fully aware of the need a robust and serious approach to protection and reaction from cyber security risks. In this context, cyber “war game” simulation and “training by experience and exercising” appear to be among the two most effective paradigms for assuring proper and actual protection and reaction to real cyber threats. To respond adequately to such needs, an advanced learning, training and exercise platform has been developed by Leonardo, enabling organization to assess their actual readiness to deal with impacts and ripple effects of cyber attacks, escalation procedures, coordination and decision making on the “best next possible” mitigation and countermeasure. Leonardo platform enables to simulate situations of attack and defense in cyber or hybrid environments, and is expected to be one of the enabling capability in use by advanced armed forces (but also by universities and large companies) for training tasks in cyber protection and warfare. Several type of exercises are possible, from Coordinated Attack Defense, where “blue team” performs infrastructure analysis and patching, during the game Red Teams attack, and each Blue Team tries to defend, to Force on Force Multi Gaming, where each Red team make targeted attacks from a list of given objectives, the Blues must detect and react. Even self contained, auto consistent Learning Tasks can be executed to support formal or experiential training courses. Other types of exercise types can be the traditional capture the flag, or post-mortem forensic, requiring an analysis of the infrastructure following an intrusion and violation activity. On top of those processe, a cyber range open solution natively enables pre-deployment testing, validation and evaluation processes for Security Products and Attack and Defense Tools. Seen as an entire ecosystem of converging competences at national / institutional level, a cyber range is ultimately a process enabler for continuous hosting of cyber learning, training and gaming, and also a fertilizer of cyber protection culture and awareness, a focus point for multi-disciplinary technology research initiatives, and an ideal catalyzer of collaborations among MoDs, Cyber Industry and Cyber Consultancy market players and University and Research Institutes.

Stefano SOLARI

Runs the Cyber Innovation & Prototypes Lab. In the Product & Technology Development Center of Cyber Security Division of Leonardo in Genoa. In his role, he is responsible of the architectural evolution of Cyber Training & Range solutions, and plays the role of Project Engineering Manager for several Military Research Programs in the area of Cyber Resilience of Critical Infrastructures; he contributes to the New Product Development and leads several Applied Research initiatives focused on deep techs as Blockchain, Big Data Analytics, Quantum Computing and their application for SCADA Systems Cyber Protection and Converged IT/OT Security. Mr. Solari is a member of the Technical Commitee of START 4.0 Competence center. He holds a an MSc in Electronic Engineering.