Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), a partner to Team Orlando, hosted a three-day demonstration of Sandia’s Information Design Assurance Red Team (IDART™) training capability on Jan. 31-Feb. 2. The goal of the demonstration was to determine whether Team Orlando could expand its relationship with Sandia to include IDART training for the services.
Sandia’s William Atkins and Benjamin Anderson presented the IDART™ training capability to several members of Team Orlando, DoD personnel, and guests from other government agencies. It introduced them to two of IDART’s training courses – Red Teaming for Program Managers (RT4PM) and the IDART Methodology. The first half-day was used to introduce and discuss RT4PM, which is designed to train program managers on when to use, or not use, a red team, and how to use that team effectively. The remaining time was spent on the IDART Methodology course, which describes the process used in an IDART assessment, and includes practical exercises that guide the students through an assessment scenario.
Integrated into the demonstration was a discussion on how the training could be leveraged by the services, and how Team Orlando could work with Sandia to deliver the training to a larger audience.
Sandia’s IDART has been performing assessments since 1996 for a variety of customers including government, military, and industry. Through its participation in a variety of government programs and leadership of industry conferences, the IDART team has assembled a broad vision of the use and practice of red teaming.
“This allows Team Orlando to do red team training for the services, leveraging methodology that is government owned,” said Dan Torgler, JTIEC deputy director and lead for Team Orlando’s cyber team. “It helps us develop our cyber capability and it also helps Sandia’s red team by off-loading most of their general services training so they can concentrate on vulnerability assessments and red teaming large systems. Then when there is something new or very specialized, we would come back together as a team to update the training.”
Sandia National Laboratories is one of 17 Department of Energy national labs. Although the Team Orlando and Sandia relationship is in development, it holds potential national security benefits through future training that could be part of Team Orlando’s capability portfolio in cyber, said Sandia’s Elaine Raybourn, who is a Team Orlando cyber team member.
“It’s been a short time since the training capability demonstration and we’re already seeing great success,” said Raybourn. “The Marine Corps has already adopted the template for training and is modifying it for their purposes. And we expect soon to see additional agreements between Sandia and Team Orlando that can facilitate our relationship in building a cyber portfolio.”
