Effectiveness of Increasing Realism Into Cybersecurity Training

This article describes how cybersecurity is a field that is growing at an exponential rate. In light of many highly publicized incidences of cyber-attacks against organizations, the need to hire experienced cybersecurity professionals is increasing. The lack of available workforce to fill open positions is alarming and organizations are finding that potential candidates with academic degrees and certifications alone are not as valuable as those with experience. Gaining rapid experience requires immersion into realistic virtual environments that mimic real-world environments. Currently, cybersecurity competitions leverage many technologies that immerse participants into virtual environments that mimic real-world systems to improve experiential learning. These systems are expensive to build and maintain, and to continuously improve realism is difficult. However, the training value of cyber competitions in which the participants cannot distinguish from real-world systems will ultimately develop highly experience cybersecurity professionals.