LightCyber Unleashes C.A.T.S. to Help Businesses Fight Off Cyberattacks

LightCyber is pouncing on cyberattackers with its new online training environment for security and IT professionals.

Cyber Attack Training System (C.A.T.S.) simulates the activities of an active attacker who has penetrated a network or an insider who is mounting an attack. Channel partners will have access to this system to use in the sales process with customers looking to protect their assets.

Jason Matlof, LightCyber’s executive vice president, tells Channel Partners that the company’s partners are often very similar to end users in that “they’re both security practitioners and very knowledgeable about blocking, but less about how attacks are done.” C.A.T.S. provides them with an environment where they “can play and actually learn how to hack the system,” he said.

LightCyber launched its first partner program in August and is “committed to” a 100 percent channel distribution model.

“We’re adding new partners and we’re training them, we’re definitely onboarding,” Matlof said. “Our goal is to target select boutique security partners.”

While many security vendors continue to promote a “flawed security strategy exclusively focused on blocking the installation of malware,” this educational program will train security professionals on how to find the “bad guys that are already operating within their network,” he said.

“It does hit some verticals more than others,” Matlof said. “There [are] basically two buckets: [The] first is industries that have regulatory requirements around disclosure … and the second type of vertical is ones that have a lot of proprietary intellectual property. And government is very much targeted, everything from state and local, all they way to federal.”

Making C.A.T.S. broadly available is part of a three-stage educational initiative. LightCyber first will host a hacker simulation challenge on Nov. 10 to see how security pros can fend off a cyberattack.

The challenge is based on an isolated corporate network environment that represents a small health-care company. The network features fabricated medical records of 10,000 patients with personally identifiable information. The object for each challenger is to learn about the network, find the data and tweet the last record from the database on the fabricated network. The challenge will be open for 12 hours, although actual breaches tend to occur over many weeks and months.

The contest shows how most breaches initially start from a “simple compromised user account or computer,” then escalate to gain further access to any other resources on the network. Contestants can register at lightcyber.com.

Following the challenge, LightCyber will unveil C.A.T.S. along with a live seminar via webcast on Nov. 17 with John Pescatore, director of the SANS Institute. The seminar will discuss and demonstrate cyberattack techniques that lead to external and insider attacks, and demonstrate how to detect them early. Registration is at sans.org and replays will be available after the initial broadcast.

“This is a game to test where you are in the hierarchy of knowledge, and we suspect it will be pretty low, and then the follow-up will be education,” said Peter Nguyen, LightCyber’s director of technical marketing.