Case Study: US Army National Guard achieves realistic, mission-ready Cyber Shield training with Keysight BreakingPoint

Keysight’s BreakingPoint Equips US Army National Guard’s Cyber Shield 2020 Cyber Training For Defending Nation’s Information Infrastructure

The US Army National Guard ran Cyber Shield 2020, a virtual cyber-range exercise with more than 800 soldiers and airmen from over 40 states, to sharpen network defense and threat-hunting skills. They needed realistic, internet-like background traffic that would obfuscate red-team attacks so blue teams would have to find and hunt threats under realistic conditions; Keysight volunteered its BreakingPoint application and security test platform to meet that need.

Keysight’s BreakingPoint generated scalable, Layer‑7 real-world application traffic and advanced strike traffic (including SCADA emulation and up to tens of thousands of strike flows), with evasion techniques and frequent threat updates from Keysight’s ATI team. The solution let red teams operate under realistic cover while blue teams hunted through a true-to-life “haystack,” and—per COL Teri D. Williams—Keysight “brought immeasurable realism, context, and value” to the exercise, enabling realistic, measurable training at scale.

US Army National Guard