A new centre at Edinburgh Napier University will offer companies a way of training staff to deal with crippling cyber attacks on websites.
Industry guests were shown how the SOCLAB centre at Edinburgh Napier’s Cyber Academy will help workers get to grips with threats like ransomware, which infected NHS systems with malicious software last year.
The Cyber Academy, based in the School of Computing, launched the security operations centre in collaboration with IT security company Satisnet in front of invited guests at the Merchiston campus.
You may have heard of the new GDPR data protection laws coming into effect in May. These oblige companies to respond swiftly to any such attack, so this type of training arena would allow organisations to train their staff before anything goes wrong.
The partnership of Satisnet and the University will also teach students and external IT workers to combat scenarios like ransomware, denial of service attacks, insider threats and data loss.
Guests at the launch watched a series of demonstrations, and listened to addresses by Joanna Cherry MP and Edinburgh Napier’s Principal Professor Andrea Nolan as well as representatives of Satisnet, ECS, Zonefox and Quorum.
In recent years the School of Computing has developed a range of systems simulating real-life IT infrastructures enabling students to learn about advanced methods such as malware analysis, penetration testing, cryptography and incident response in a safe environment.
Professor Bill Buchanan, who leads the Cyber Academy, said: “Our dream has always been to build training infrastructures which mimic the real-life IT environment in which we can run scenarios.
“The collaboration with Satisnet underlines that we aim to use the most advanced systems and tools possible, and to train people for a wide spectrum of roles in which they can identify threats and respond to them.”
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