A host of IT professionals have been convening at the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center this week, as the fifth annual Cyber Dawg event kicked off on Monday.
The week-long training exercise, coordinated by the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), brings together various state entities to practice defending against cyber threats.
Participants train inside an emulated network: a controlled, operating sandbox environment, a kind of “fake internet,” in which they can learn to detect, and protect systems from, online attacks, said cyber range architect Jonathan Race.
“They get to actually see real world attacks,” said Race, who did all the development design for the networks Cyber Dawg trainees are working within. “Consequence-free, without ruining actual systems that they normally operate on a day-to-day basis.”
Cybersecurity and IT specialists from agencies ranging from the Georgia Lottery to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Georgia National Guard come to the Georgia Cyber Center cultivate applied knowledge on potential dangers.
This year, Race notes, roughly 500 virtual systems that are deployed to include what one would normally find in enterprises, such as email and file storage services, to help specialists train against phishing attacks, for example.
The Georgia Cyber Center has proven a significant asset to the state’s Cyber Dawg event, with the center’s capabilities to create and maintain the kind of networks and artificial environments to facilitate hands-on cybersecurity experience for IT professionals, said Deputy State Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Mike Davis.
One of the latest elements introduced to the exercise this year was the Mitre Attack Framework, developed by the Mitre Corporation, which is a knowledge base to help classify different kinds of cyber-attacks.
“[It] allows the participants to begin to recognize different attack techniques and different attack patterns to then be able to do predictive analysis on where they should be looking next,” said Davis.
The deputy CISO acknowledges the importance of this kind of training at Cyber Dawg, ultimately a collaboration between the Georgia Guard and the (GTA), especially amid attacks such as the one against the City of Augusta earlier this summer (which Davis admits he could not comment on directly, as he’s not involved in cybersecurity in the city).
“Our training objectives are actually fairly simple,” said Davis. “It provides them the ability to see things that hopefully they’ll never see, but unfortunately probably will at some point in their career.”
Cyber Dawg 2023 started Monday and will continue through Friday at the Georgia Cyber Center.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
