Workshops | 2nd Australian Space Cyber Forum

Workshops organised by CyberOps.

This year, The 2nd Australian Space Cyber Forum scheduled a new workshop section the day before the forum on Tuesday 25 June.

1. Global Space Cyber Incident Management 

The cyber threats to global space infrastructure are increasingly becoming evident to regulators, defence agencies and space system operators. The Space ISAC based in Colorado Springs has been operating since 2019 and building a capability to gather information and share it amongst the global space industry. It is a mechanism for the sharing of knowledge and development of ideas and responses to protect space assets and space services that are critical to our daily lives. In the last year they industry have stood up their global watch centre that proactively gathers and shares information in a timely manner to stakeholders. The next part of the puzzle is once the information is known and the threat determined to apply to a particular organisation, they need to be equipped to respond. This is the role of incident management (IM) and the knowledge and skills for this activity in the space environment is best learnt through workshops where a range of options are discussed. This is especially true in a Space environment where there are many stakeholders spread across the globe and timeliness is also key. The workshop aims to give attendees insight into the issues raised during a space incident and how individual organisations or government agencies can prepare, train and respond to these issues.

2. Space Cyber Course and Range Experiences 

• Introduction to Space Cyber Training Course
• Hands on Space Cyber Range Experience

(1) Introduction to Space Cyber Training Course: This course has been developed as part of a Defence Space Command funded project to lift the space cyber awareness in Australia. It is part of a larger series of courses that eventually lead to preparing practitioners to operate alongside space domain awareness staff and space systems operators to help secure Australian space assets. The course provides overviews of the evolution of space cyber over the last 30 years and its intersection with other RF based activities in Space. Then current activities and future evolution of space services and their cyber threats are presented. The course then discusses the current cyber frameworks and the new ones in development. It also discusses the application of Zero Trust Architectures to the space environment. Finally, it delves into more detail for each of the space ecosystems, Ground, Space, Link, User, and Supply Chain where sample specific threats are discussed and possible remediation proposed.

(2) Hands on Space Cyber Range Experience: The Space Cyber Simulation environment is being developed to support a number of training and testing scenarios for Defence and government critical infrastructure needs. The team building the capability have years of experience training for and participation in the NATO cyber wargames. A specific scenario has been developed for this workshop to give attendees the ability to develop and/or hone their skills as a space operator in the detection of a space issue, determining the cause and what if any cyber threat vector may have  occurred. Then turning their mind to being a cyber operator they need to determine the issue and remediate it. Only once that is complete can they return the space object back to its desired state. The exercise will take place in the Australian Cyber Collaboration Range that has been specifically developed for these types of activities and is the home of the Australian  team when competing in global challenges such as the NATO cyber wargames. The experience will aim to give enough opportunity for beginners to get a taste of what is involved and more experiences players a chance to finish the task and potentially explore other aspects of cyber and space operations.