June 25, 2020 – Invictus cyber engineers in Orlando, Florida and Fort Meade, Maryland have been planning and supporting US Cyber Command’s CYBER FLAG (CF) 20-2 exercise for the months leading up to the exercise and as part of the exercise itself, which ends this Friday, 26 Jun 2020.
As part of the cyber engineering teams developing the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE), Invictus has been integral part of ensuring the simulation scenario, cyber range content, and Regional Compute and Storage (RCS) platform were ready leading up to the exercise.
During the CF 20-2 exercise, the Invictus team has been focusing on the operations of the Regional Compute and Storage (RCS) platform. This mission focus is to enable service cyber component teams to develop and identify training content use to train the warfighting Cyber Mission Forces (CMFs). This has been an on-going evolution since the first of June to prepare for the exercise and now during the exercise to monitor a proactive approach to provide system/platform availability. With a rigorous battle rhythm the team has been completing front end system checks on a half hour basis, focusing on every aspect of the dashboard matrix, such as users logged on, memory utilization, active consoles, open sessions and console log-in time. In addition to the front end checks the team is closely monitoring back end system communications checks 4 times a day. Making sure all virtual machines are functioning properly and the firewall and network within the platform is performing within the required parameters. With all these checks being accomplished, the team is keeping a proactive mind set to ensure any issues will not become a single point of failure for the CF exercise.
The Invictus team has managed the creation of more than 550 accounts that were created for the exercise. In addition, our account managers have been adapting to the changes and reallocations demonstrating the agility required to support a dynamic exercise with over 500 participants from 5 countries and operating in 9 different time zones requires. As the CF teams have been operating on RCS 00 the Invictus team has been monitoring the movement of upcoming Range content onto the new RCS which will be utilized for upcoming cyber exercises. In just the past week alone, Invictus cyber engineers have created/moved over 23TB of range content to support the exercise.
Invictus continues to transform the way CMFs train, enabling the country to have a more advanced cyber defense posture.
More information on the CYBER FLAG 20-2 exercise can be found in USCYBERCOM’s Jun 22nd Press Release here.