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I’ll sleep better at night

JUICE is an annual event bringing together cyber operators from the Joint Service community, US Government organizations like TSA and FEMA from CONUS locations, and forward deployed operational cells from all over the globe.

SimVentions was able to demonstrate how system outages caused by things like natural disasters or cyber attacks could both be tracked and mitigated against by providing Cyber Operators with an interactive map of the Marine Corps’ cyber battle space. As operators tracked outages and planned mitigation steps in the Mission Assurance Decision Support System (MADSS), other analysts could gather metadata on affected nodes using two other SimVentions tools, PMaP and Informedb. This capability increased the Marine Corps visibility into dependencies of their network and helped planners identify key cyber terrain. Mr. James Smerchansky, Deputy Commander for MCSC visited JUICE and saw a full demonstration of the systems integrated by SimVentions and commented, “I’ll sleep better at night knowing this is being done.”

“I’ll sleep better at night knowing this is being done.”

James Smerchansky, Deputy Commander for Marine Corps Systems Command (MCSC)

Scott Streisel, the Marine Corps Division’s Test & Evaluation Lead, coordinated the NSWCDD, MARCORSYSCOM and MARFORCYBER participation for JUICE. When asked about his experience preparing for JUICE Scott said, “As a Test Lead I have worked with the SimVentions team to create an Exercise Plan that would demonstrate and validate the capabilities of the Cyber COP/SA. JUICE 14 has provided the Marine Corps the first opportunity to demonstrate Cyber COP/SA on a live joint network. It has provided an opportunity to obtain feedback from Cyber COP/SA operators within a Joint Negotiating and Consultation Committee/Joint Consultation Committee (JNCC/JCC). SimVentions provided the experienced team needed to successfully execute, exercise, and document the results.”

The first building block of the system SimVentions built for validation at JUICE was the development of Fit-For Purpose (FFP) SV-2 Cyber Architecture Diagrams. The SimVentions Marine Corps Division’s Cyber Architecture Team traveled to several Marine Corps installations in Okinawa, Bahrain, Germany, Hawaii, North Carolina, and California to capture data for the architecture task into the standardized template provided by the FFP SV-2.

Terrell McCandrew led efforts to normalize and structure the data captured. To allow other systems to process and analyze the data, SimVentions had to customize certain aspects of the PMaP tool. Nancy Kraus (SimV COP/SA team member) explained, “I developed a [Microsoft] Visio add-in for Terrell that assisted him in entering the data in the JUICE Visio diagram prior to importing it. I also developed a tool that imported all the data, including the relationships, from the JUICE Visio diagram into PMaP.”

The success of the event was truly a team effort, crossing not only the Systems Engineering, Software Development, and Program Management functions within SimVentions but bridging between the organizations hosted at JUICE, as well as Dahlgren, Marine Corps Systems Command, and Marine Forces Cyber Command. SimVentions continues to “lead the edge” as a valued company and partner in a rapidly developing battle space.