Improving Cybersecurity Capabilities at Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy by Building and Developing a Security Operations and Training Center

Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives. For the end-user of IT devices, this is a personal responsibility. In a corporate network, however, the responsibilities for implementing a certain level of cybersecurity are not individual or of a certain team, but of each of the employees. The development of capabilities to counter cyber threats is associated with certain organizational and technical measures. End-user training is undoubtedly one of the leading organizational measures. Conducting training in an environment as close as possible to the real one helps the trainees to better understanding the existing threats and the result of them. At the same time, the use of a real IT infrastructure for conducting trainings hides many challenges and leads to the need for specific planning and organizing the usage of the available information resources. The specificity of the main activity of Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy (NVNA) presupposes the building of specific capabilities for cyber defense and conducting training in the field of cybersecurity for users with different knowledge and skills. Particular challenges in this activity area are involved with the IMO requirements for cybersecurity at sea. This paper presents the adopted concept in NVNA for building and developing a Security Operations and Training Center (SOTC). Major design and organizations steps are described. A part of this concept was presented on “Digilience 2020” conference.