How Kaizen Can Help Train Your Cyber Workforce

Traditional certifications and lecture-based training may teach fundamental technical concepts, but they can’t prepare your cyber workforce for the dynamic and complex challenges that they encounter in the real world. That's what makes capture the flag (CTF), the traditional hacker wargame, such a powerful training tool for cybersecurity professionals—it forces them to team up and think fast to solve novel problems under pressure and on the fly.

Booz Allen's CTF events are designed to test and build your cyber team's skills through scenarios based on adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures observed in the real world by our expert threat researchers. They're staged in environments built from familiar components and tailored to mimic your organization's actual operating environment. The challenges themselves are multilayered and carefully crafted to cover unfamiliar territory for participants. We serve up problems that your workforce may not know how to solve or even approach at first. It is this ability to learn on the fly and think outside of the box that gives hackers their elite reputation—and it's something your teams can learn.

The term “Kaizen” comes from the Japanese culture, and refers to a philosophy of continuous learning and self-improvement. It's part of what inspires our own cyber practitioners to be the best, so we've developed a training program for our clients that embraces it as well. Our Kaizen challenges cover a wide range of skills, such as web and binary exploitation, forensics, networking, and ad hoc scripting. We can even incorporate highly specialized elements, like industrial control systems and connected vehicles.

Whether joining remotely or in-person, participants are immersed in a competitive yet educational environment where they compete for prizes and bragging rights, and learn different ways to approach problems and to think creatively. If they get stuck, we have a hint system, and moderators are available to guide participants to the solution rather than telling them outright.

• Teambuilding: Scenarios are specially crafted to foster collaboration. To move forward, players must work together, combining skills from a variety of cyber disciplines to discover and share key pieces of information obtained from different parts of the exercise.
• Training: Our hands-on, cyber-simulated exercises can train new and existing staff across a variety of competencies, such as reverse-engineering, networking, forensics, and exploitation. Employees can join remotely from anywhere in the world for the opportunity to learn advanced skills from top industry experts.
• Assessment: Our process enables you to measure the skill levels of your current workforce, identify talent across different cyber competencies, and determine which competencies your organization excels at and which areas to focus on for additional training.
• Morale: These events are a great way to raise morale for cybersecurity teams. They're a chance to have fun during the workday and show that your organization is truly invested in developing its professionals.

We have various offerings to fit the needs of your organization, including:

• Onsite: Half-day or full-day events
• Custom: We can develop custom challenge sets to fit organizational needs, including remote delivery.

Kaizen is ideal for people whose day-to-day work is technical, hands on, or involves dynamic problem solving, especially those working in the following roles:

• Security professionals and information technology (IT) security enthusiasts looking to learn out-of-the-box approaches, including security personnel who assess networks and systems to find and fix vulnerabilities
• Ethical hackers who believe in responsible disclosure of weaknesses and vulnerabilities
• Defenders who want to understand offensive methodologies, tools, and techniques
• Security auditors who are looking to gain more technical skills

Explore our various CTF scenarios in which your staff can participate:

• Missile Destroyer
• Missile Destroyer Threat Hunting
• Bomb Defuser
• Bank Heist

To learn more or to set up your Kaizen event, please e-mail the Kaizen CTF team or fill in the form below.