My Academia

The FORESIGHT project aims to develop a federated cyber-range solution to enhance the preparedness of cyber-security professionals at all levels and advance their skills towards preventing, detecting, reacting and mitigating sophisticated cyber attacks. This is achieved by delivering an ecosystem of networked realistic training and siltation platforms that collaboratively bring unique cyber security aspects from the aviation, smart grid and naval domains.

The proposed platform will extend the capabilities of existing cyber ranges and will allow the creation of complex cross-domain/hybrid scenarios to be built jointly with the IoT domain. Emphasis is given on the design and implementation of realistic and dynamic scenarios that are based on identified and forecasted trends of cyber attacks and vulnerabilities extorted from cyber threat intelligence gathered from the dark web; this will enable cyber-security professionals to rapidly adapt to an evolving threat landscape.

The development of advanced risk analysis and econometric models will prove to be valuable in estimating the impact of cyber risks, selecting the most appropriate and affordable security measures, and minimising the cost and time to recover from cyber attacks. Innovative training curricula, guiding cyber security professionals to implement and combine security measures using new technologies and established learning methodologies, will be created and employed for training needs’ they will be linked to professional certification programs an due supported by learning platforms.

Aside from the development of skills, the project aims at a holistic approach to cyber threat management with the ultimate goal of cultivating a strong security culture. As such, the project puts considerable emphasis on research and development (I.e. research on cyber threats, development of novel ideas, etc) as the key to increasing training dynamics and awareness methods for exceeding the rate of evolutions of cyber attackers.

The project entailed the purchase of second hand, used USB drives from online auction sites, like GumTree and eBay.

These drives were then forensically analised using freely available data recovery and forensics tools to see what level of hygiene was being followed by those selling their old drives. As part of the project, I followed established forensic procedures relating to the aquision of the forensic drive images, and only analysed these images, leaving the source drives intact.

Steps were taken at each step of this project to protect the sellers anonymity, meaning that after the drives were checked into the study, there was no method to tie them back to an individual seller.