Ravello Enables First of Its Kind Hacker Simulation in the Cloud

Ravello Systems, the world’s leading nested virtualization company, announced today that LightCyber, a leading provider of Active Breach Detection solutions, is the latest cyber security company to use Ravello’s security sandboxing in the cloud. Ravello enables enterprises to simulate attacks on life-like user environments, but inside a secure capsule in the cloud.

Companies like LightCyber, Symantec (Hacker Academy) and SimSpace are among those using Ravello to push simulated security attacks to new levels. Using Ravello, LightCyber is able to employ a scalable system for sophisticated hacking simulations, helping organizations stay on top of the latest enterprise security threats.

Ravello’s nested virtualization and software-defined networking technology makes it easy to recreate entire data centers with existing virtual appliances on leading public clouds such as AWS and Google, complete with data-center-like networking. One of the emerging use cases for this technology is security testing in a real-world setting in the cloud — at a fraction of the cost of dedicated hardware.

LightCyber announced that its Cyber Attack Training System (C.A.T.S) is based on a simulated enterprise network environment created on Ravello’s cloud platform. To introduce C.A.T.S, LightCyber is hosting a Hacker Simulation Challenge on the Ravello cloud using a simulated corporate network environment that is representative of a small healthcare company. This network features fabricated medical records of 10,000 patients with Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The object of the Hacker Simulation is for each challenger to find the host with the target data, compromise that database and then tweet the last record to prove successful completion of the challenge.

“It would take months of work and lots of hardware to setup a complex hacker simulation challenge like ours,” said Peter Nguyen, Director of Technical Marketing at LightCyber. “But now with Ravello, we are able to use the public cloud to quickly stand up various simulation challenges with actual appliances and network traffic mimicking real world scenarios. Ravello is the first platform that allows us to quickly create authentic scenarios to test today’s toughest threat vectors. The speed at which we can create these environments using Ravello is key to our hacker simulation success, which in turn helps the industry increase overall cyber security readiness.”

The Hacker Simulation Challenge will start on Tuesday, Nov. 10th and will be open for 12 hours and will feature more than 100 contestants from around the world.

“Ravello’s built-in network isolation creates a secure capsule – which is key to enabling safe security testing in the cloud,” said Rami Tamir, CEO of Ravello Systems. “In addition, we can recreate whole data centers in the cloud and our blueprinting capability provides repeatable deployments for cyber security companies. Companies like Light Cyber can now deploy large scale multi-node environments for hack games, training labs and practice ranges – entirely on demand.”

Cyber security companies are able to perform real-world threat assessments, malware testing, research and development and threat simulation by using Ravello’s ability to:

• Provide access to fully isolated layer 2 networking in AWS and Google Cloud
• Run existing data center environments unmodified in the public cloud
• Save multi-node blueprints for repeatable deployments