The need for training cybersecurity experts is growing rapidly. In 2019, the (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study estimated there were 291,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in Europe: a number that has almost doubled since 2018. To address this gap, CyberSec4Europe acknowledges the need to educate new specialists and provide tools that would allow specialists to fulfill their work tasks efficiently.
The Cyber Sandbox Creator lab environments can be distributed to individuals and SMEs. Key benefits of the created labs are:
- Lightweight design. The lab can be hosted on a standard PC or laptop and used with zero additional costs. The only limit is the available system resources of the host PC.
- Portability. The lab can be hosted at any standard hosting operating system: Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
- Transparency. The lab uses proven and open-source components and best practices.
CSIRT-MU have tested the lab at Masaryk University, Brno, in the Czech Republic, to prepare and configure custom environments for cybersecurity training of their students. Students were provided with the created lab and completed their tasks there or worked on their thesis projects. They have recently provided Cyber Sandbox Creator to instructors at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, who will follow this approach.
Another use case now being tested by a medium-sized company from the Czech Republic simulates its industrial control system in the lab environment created with Cyber Sandbox Creator.
Cyber Sandbox Creator uses the same format for the definition of a virtual environment (sandbox) as KYPO Cyber Range Platform. That means users can save time and costs for developing and testing their sandboxes locally at their computers before deploying them to a fully-fledged cyber range platform. CSIRT-MU also piloted this use case and thus demonstrated a successful operational federation of Cyber Sandbox Creator and KYPO Cyber Range.
CyberSec4Europe has released the first prototype of Cyber Sandbox Creator as open source and look for early adopters from other institutions who would like to try their use cases and provide feedback. If you are interested, check out their public project repository and e-mail svabensky@fi.muni.cz.