CINCINNATI — In 2021, the FBI received more than 5,100 cyber security crime-related complaints in Ohio, according to the FBI’s 2021 Internet Crime Report, which is why the Ohio Cyber Range Institute and Ohio Cyber Reserve are partnering together for the Pilot Cyber Security exercise.

It’s all hoping to prevent future cyber attacks. 

Dozens of OCRI and the OhCR members took part in a cyber security exercise at the University of Cincinnati’s 1819 Innovation Hub on July 15.

The training is what Maj. Gen. John Harris said is important for his team. 

“This is just a next level of training for our Ohio Cyber Reserve,” said Harris. “Our responsibility first and foremost is to respond if there is a crisis here in Ohio.”

Members are split into teams for a four-day “real scenario” cyber incident training. The blue team is responding to the incident. While the red team are the attackers. 

“It’s not just an attack,” he said. “It’s multiple attacks on a particular county creating that county’s worst Cyber Day so they’ll test themselves against all odds even up to the most high-level complex threat, what we call an APT.”

OCRI is an institute at UC that helps improve cyber security for Ohioans and the OhCR helps cities with cybersecurity incidents.

Through the trainings, OhCR hopes to improve its ability to respond to cyber security missions, and the OCRI looks to develop more challenging and realistic cyber security simulations.

“We try to broaden the horizons, giving us as many as experiences and as many looks as we possibly can at the threat because it’s ever evolving and it’s forever changing,” he said. 

It was the first public cyber security exercise in Ohio led by OCRI and OhCR. OCRI plans to continue to help government, educational and private industry audiences develop skills and processes in cyber incident response.

“It gives us a great way to organize, it gives us great systems of command and control during responses and value it brings to us, the ability to be able to go out and help do assessments on the local government is critical to just helping us protecting Ohio,” Harris said.