How do you prepare for cyber attacks on local governments? If you're University of Cincinnati's Ohio Cyber Range Institute, you work with the Ohio National Guard to build computer simulations of an entire city, launch cyber attacks at it, and then have three volunteer teams of IT professionals try to save it.
OCRI Executive Staff Director Bekah Michael says the four-day training exercise took months of preparation.
"We can simulate the library system, we can simulate the offices that we'd have in a normal city," Michael says. "And then also we're simulating the internet through gray space; we're simulating social media."
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The teams from Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus — called the Ohio Cyber Reserve — are made up of information technology experts from local and state governments, private enterprise and other sectors. OCRI and the National Guard pit them against a series of simulated cyber attacks using strategies that range from relatively simple techniques to complex, resource-intensive attacks you'd see from organized crime or state actors. The teams are then evaluated based on their effectiveness, nimbleness and adherence to standard operating procedures.
Following completion of the exercises, the teams will be certified for deployment by the Ohio National Guard should an Ohio municipality suffer a significant cyber attack.
Michael says the training is patterned after one offered by the U.S. Department of Defense earlier this year called Cyber Shield. She's volunteered at that event for two years in a row.
"The DOD is far ahead in how they run exercises and how they assess the performance of an incident response team in an exercise," Michael says. "By being immersed in the training team, seeing the whole thing all the way through execution and after where the assessment teams are building the reports, we're able to see exactly how to implement that guide, why certain things are important and how to set everything up at this huge scale."
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Ohio Air National Guard Brigadier General David Johnson gave remarks during the exercise. He says such trainings are vital to protect Ohioans.
"There are 560,000 malware attacks every day," he says. "Sixty-five percent of Americans have been subjected to an online scam. This is prevalent. It's every day."
The University of Cincinnati is a financial support of WVXU.