Immersive Labs and Digital Shadows have today announced the launch of ‘Immersive Intelligence,’ a lab-based learning environment for cyber security teams to quickly learn to deal with the most recent threats. Coupling threat intelligence with relevant and near real-time learning, Immersive Intelligence Labs have been designed to reduce security staff’s Mean-Time-To-Learn and an organisation’s overall risk posture.
The outdated way cyber skills are taught to security and technical teams puts companies at risk. Threat intelligence is increasingly disconnected from the skills of security teams, whose training is based on legacy methods and yesterday’s threats. Recognising the gap is leaving organisations exposed, Immersive Labs and Digital Shadows have partnered to make threat intelligence actionable. Using the Mitre ATT&CK Framework, Digital Shadows’ Weekly Intelligence Summaries and live threat intelligence feeds will be spun into ‘Labs’ – Immersive Labs’ training environments – within hours of global threats and vulnerabilities being discovered, allowing security teams to complete a series of exercises to safely gain practical knowledge of the threat and mitigations to reduce the probability and impact of a successful attack.
In addition to providing real-time skills-based learning, the platform’s analytics and insight provides visibility of individual and team cyber capabilities, identifying skill gaps and confirming time-sensitive threat intelligence labs have been completed. Not only does this ensure business leaders can be confident their security team’s skills are up to scratch, but it also highlights areas of cyber risk, allowing appropriate action to be taken.
James Hadley, CEO and Founder, Immersive Labs said: “The rate that cyber security threats are morphing is leaving security teams floundering, as most of what they have learnt on a training course becomes redundant almost as soon as they’ve left the room. Our labs provide bitesize war-games that turn training into a game which challenges people to be creative and come up with their own solutions. Partnering with Digital Shadows allows us to take this one-step further with exercises based on real-time threat intelligence, meaning cyber skills training stops being theoretical and becomes highly relevant to front-line teams.”
James Chappell, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, Digital Shadows said: “This exciting new collaboration has real benefits to both companies’ customers. Threat intelligence has quickly become a priority for enterprises as they fight potential security incidents across multiple vectors. Through our partnership with Immersive Labs, we’re now offering the ability to realise further benefits from that intelligence by increasing the skills of security teams and reducing their mean-time-to-learn. The combination of threat intelligence and real-time learning environments will fundamentally change the way organisations are able to respond to threats and drastically improve the relevance of security teams’ skills.”
For example, throughout 2018 a number of large retailers fell victim to a cybercrime technique characterised as the Magecart group. While the group(s) have been in operation for more than two-years, 2018 saw companies like Ticketmaster, Newegg and Sotheby’s suffer at their hands. The group operates by injecting malicious javascript to skim credit cards, either through compromising a third-party module (such as analytics, ads, or UX tools) or by compromising the organisation’s own servers. The severity of these attacks requires security teams to be aware of how the compromise operates to enable detection as well as incident response. Immersive Labs and Digital Shadows approach means an Intelligence Lab will be created within hours of the attack being identified by Digital Shadows, using real-life scenarios and intelligence to engage security teams in learning.
About Immersive Labs
Founder James Hadley had the initial idea after instructing GCHQ’s Cyber Summer School, teaching 18-25-year-old students everything from evasion to penetration testing over a ten-week period. He noticed the classes with the highest success rate were the ethical hacking challenges featuring games, which enabled students to solve problems, as opposed to sitting passively in a classroom.
Just two years later, the company has grown from just two people to 65 globally. Immersive Labs has offices in Bristol, London and New York.
For more information on Immersive Labs’ offering, please visit www.immersivelabs.com/.
