A Testbed To Study Adversarial Cyber-Attack Strategies in Enterprise Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a specialized testbed environment that simulates enterprise network vulnerabilities, allowing researchers to study and analyze various cyber-attack strategies in a controlled setting.

Contribution

The work presents a novel testbed setup with multiple attack pathways, enabling detailed analysis of adversarial attack strategies on enterprise networks.

Findings

Collected data on attack strategies and pathways

Analyzed effectiveness of different attack methods

Demonstrated the testbed's utility for cybersecurity research

Abstract

In this work, we propose a testbed environment to capture the attack strategies of an adversary carrying out a cyber-attack on an enterprise network. The testbed contains nodes with known security vulnerabilities which can be exploited by hackers. Participants can be invited to play the role of a hacker (e.g., black-hat, hacktivist) and attack the testbed. The testbed is designed such that there are multiple attack pathways available to hackers. We describe the working of the testbed components and discuss its implementation on a VMware ESXi server. Finally, we subject our testbed implementation to a few well-known cyber-attack strategies, collect data during the process and present our analysis of the data.