Leonardo presents its Cyber & Security Academy, the new high-level training center established by the company to provide Defense, public administrations, critical infrastructures and businesses the skills and capabilities necessary to support the digital transition and face threats to national security.
The Cyber & Security Academy, based in Genoa, will offer courses and seminars in Italy and abroad through various structures on the territory. The aim of the training course is to make cyber security a systemic theme for all organizations.
The proprietary platforms Cyber Range and Cyber Trainer are at the core of the Academy. Designed with the principles of gamification (using mechanisms similar to those of games, with the assignment of objectives and rewards for each achievement), they leverage both virtualization and interoperability to simulate immersive operational scenarios. Utilizing “digital twins” of networks, systems and applications to be protected, as well as threats and tools for both attack and defense, both individuals and groups will be able to put into practice the skills acquired to defend the infrastructure. Leonardo’s platforms are able to support exercises with digital twins of thousands of nodes and hundreds of networks, simulating up to five complex scenarios simultaneously, with multiple teams and tens of users per team.
The Cyber & Security Academy will count on the experience acquired by Leonardo in the physical and cyber protection of critical infrastructures in over 150 countries around the world and on the information assets developed by dealing on a daily basis with particularly sophisticated threats in the most critical and strategic domains: Aerospace, Defense and Security. With over 100,000 cyber-protected users, Leonardo monitors approximately 115,000 security events per second and manages over 1,800 cyber alarms per day.
Faculty will be comprised of professionals in critical security domains, utilizing the skills of Leonardo’s experts and of collaboration with the academic world, centers of excellence, institutions and companies.
Center of excellence in Europe, the Cyber & Security Academy also represents an opportunity for the territory and the Italian training supply chain, supporting Leonardo’s Lab and HPC davinci-1 in the industrial digitization hub created by Leonardo in Genoa. It places itself as an aggregator and federator of realities, contents and experiences, which can be put in synergy and enhanced through Leonardo’s experience and technological infrastructure.
The Cyber & Security Academy is meant for all actors involved in national security. Security is increasingly being put to the test by cyber threats: according to the latest report by CLUSIT (the Italian Association for Information Security), 2,049 serious cyber-attacks were recorded in the world in 2021, almost 10% more than in 2020, and cybercrime has cost $6 trillion globally. Through its cyber threat intelligence activity, in 2021 Leonardo identified macro cyber threats linked both to eCrime, aimed at financial profit, and to growing cyber intrusions to the detriment of government, defense, aerospace and health sectors, but also of energy and telecommunications, without forgetting the industrial world. The objectives are the most disparate: from the collection and exfiltration of sensitive data and information, to sabotage, up to the compromise of strategic infrastructures and defense capabilities of governments and institutions.
In this context, cyber security and intelligence activities play a fundamental role in which Leonardo has over 160 expert analysts and platforms capable of 500,000 billion operations per second dedicated to monitoring, identifying and analyzing cyber threats and to support decisions to minimize the impacts of any attacks. Just as crucial are continuous monitoring and adequate management and resolution of crises and incidents, through Security Operation Center services: Leonardo’s Global SOC in Chieti (Italy) monitors every year over 4.7 million Indicators of Compromise, i.e. digital traces of cyber incidents.
To protect digital ecosystems and strategic infrastructures, procedures and technologies are not enough: 85% of cyber breaches are caused by human error. According to estimates by the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency, today in Italy there is a need for at least 100,000 new IT security experts, while for the World Economic Forum (The Global Risks Report 2022) the gap of security professionals in the world is 3 million. Always according to the World Economic Forum (Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022), 59% of global cyber-leaders would find it difficult to respond to a cybersecurity incident precisely because of the lack of skills within their teams.
Leonardo’s Cyber & Security Academy addresses these needs: promoting the culture of security and providing the skills necessary to recognize the threats of physical and cyber space, to know how to understand and deal with them.
Source: Leonardo release