Adversary thinking is an essential skill for cybersecurity experts, enabling them to understand cyber attacks and set up effective defenses. While this skill is commonly exercised by Capture the Flag games and hands-on activities, we complement these approaches with a key innovation: undergraduate students learn methods of network attack and defense by creating educational games in a cyber range. In this paper, we present the design of two courses, instruction and assessment techniques, as well as our observations over the last three semesters. The students report they had a unique opportunity to deeply understand the topic and practice their soft skills, as they presented their results at a faculty open day event. Their peers, who played the created games, rated the quality and educational value of the games overwhelmingly positively. Moreover, the open day raised awareness about cybersecurity and research and development in this field at our faculty. We believe that sharing our teaching experience will be valuable for instructors planning to introduce active learning of cybersecurity and adversary thinking.
The exchange of security alerts is a current trend in network security and incident response. Alerts from network intrusion detection systems are shared among organizations so that it is possible to see the "big picture" of current security situation. However, the quality and redundancy of the input data seem to be underrated. We present four use cases of aggregation of the alerts from network intrusion detection systems. Alerts from a sharing platform deployed in the Czech national research and education network were examined in a case study. Volumes of raw and aggregated data are presented and a rule of thumb is proposed: up to 85 % of alerts can be aggregated. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of alert aggregation for the network intrusion detection system, such as (in)completeness of the alerts and optimal time windows for aggregation.
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