The U.S. Air Force 90th Cyberspace Operations Squadron has developed a training tool to help the force’s Cyber Protection Teams, which defends priority Department of Defense networks and systems against such malicious cyber-physical acts, prepare for cyberattacks.
The tool, called Bricks in the Loop, links cyber and physical resources to allow airmen to conceptualize and understand how a cyber action can affect the physical world.
Training with full-scale models is too costly. The squadron created a scaled environment out of toy, plastic bricks and combined them with an IT network built from open source or low-cost software.
The model took four months and cost less than $4,000.
“The look and functionality of the environment allows the trainee to easily translate the model to critical missions on most bases, and the potential damage that could occur from a malicious cyber-physical attack on those missions,” Christopher De La Rosa, the squadron’s cyber modeling and simulation environments lead, said. “There are many more scenarios relevant to Air Force bases that, if disrupted, may have a critical impact on assigned missions.”
The scaled environment includes buildings and vehicles that can be lit up, moved forward or backward, spun, ring alarms or stop working when hacked.