Simulation and Wargaming

10Simulation‐Based Cyber Wargaming

Ambrose Kam

Lockheed Martin, Moorestown, NJ, USA

Motivation and Overview

Cybersecurity threats are growing exponentially. The “barrier to entry” for individuals interested in carrying out cyberattacks to institutions, and even nation‐states, is lower than ever before. Yet, cyberattacks can have devastating impacts‐from losing someone's savings or credentials to causing social and economic chaos through disruption of the national services. Better cybersecurity approaches are needed to defend mission‐critical systems and network infrastructure; unfortunately, traditional cybersecurity solutions like anti‐virus and network firewall are reactive in nature. We need to better understand the cyber threats and develop cyber solutions. This drives the need for simulation‐based wargames and tabletop exercises, so that defenders can better anticipate the adversary's attack vectors and employ the appropriate strategy in a realistic manner. This is especially relevant as our military systems are expected to support multi‐domain operations (MDO) in a highly contested environment. Modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques should be used to explore different what‐if attack scenarios, so cyber protection team (CPT) can be trained in a heuristic manner. Human‐in‐the‐loop virtual simulation could be leveraged to assess cyber operators real‐time decision‐making abilities and their overall skill level. With a simulation‐based cyber wargaming environment, we can ...