Traditional certifications and lecture-based training may teach fundamental technical concepts, but they can’t prepare your workforce for the dynamic and complex challenges that they encounter in the real world. That's what makes Capture the Flag (CTF), the traditional hacker wargame, so important for security professionals. CTF events are designed to test and build the skills of cybersecurity professionals through real-world scenarios. The challenges are carefully crafted, multilayered, and cover non-obvious vulnerabilities. Your workforce may not have seen these types of challenges before and may not know how to solve or even approach them at first. It's this ability to learn on the fly and think outside of the box that gives hackers their elite reputation—and it's something your workforce can learn.
What is Kaizen?
The term “Kaizen” comes from the Japanese philosophy for continuous learning and improvement of skills and self, which accurately describes our participants and mindset. At Booz Allen, our cyber practitioners take this to heart and have developed a training program for our clients that embraces this concept. Our Kaizen challenges cover a wide range of skills, such as web and binary exploitation, forensics, networking, and ad hoc scripting. A full array of audio and visual equipment, rich with sounds and leaderboards, immerses participants in a competitive, yet educational environment. Participants learn different ways to approach problems and think creatively. Individuals stuck or unfamiliar with a challenge are offered a hint system, and moderators are available to guide participants to the solution rather than telling them outright.
What Are the Key Benefits Of Using Kaizen?
- Teambuilding: Scenarios are specially crafted to foster collaboration, where players must work together and share key pieces of information obtained from different parts of the exercise to move forward.
- Training: The events provide hands-on, cyber-simulated exercises to train new and existing staff across a variety of competencies, such as reverse-engineering, networking, forensics, and exploitation. Employees from around the world have the opportunity to learn advanced skills from top industry experts.
- Assessment: The process enables you to measure the skill levels of your current workforce, identify talent across different cyber competencies, and determine which competencies your organization excels at and which areas to focus on for additional training.
- Morale: These events are a great way to raise morale for cybersecurity staff, allowing them to have fun while showing that your organization has a vested interest in their professional growth.
What Are the Different Offerings?
We have various offerings to fit your organization's needs, including:
- Onsite: Half-day or full-day events
- Custom: Tailored challenge sets to fit organizational needs, including remote delivery.
Who Should Participate?
Kaizen is ideal for people whose day-to-day work is technical, hands-on, or involves dynamic problem solving, especially those working in the following roles:
- Security professionals and IT security enthusiasts looking to learn out-of-the-box approaches, including security personnel who assess networks and systems to find and fix vulnerabilities
- Ethical hackers who believe in responsible disclosure of weaknesses and vulnerabilities
- Defenders who want to understand offensive methodologies, tools, and techniques
- Security auditors who are looking to gain more technical skills
Explore our CTF scenarios in which your staff can participate:
To learn more or set up your Kaizen event, please e-mail the Kaizen CTF team.
