4 ways to implement a cybersecurity workforce development plan with HTB

Managers and technical leaders often encounter the problem of planning (and delivering) a skills development program that aligns with their business goals. The problem with traditional cybersecurity training—and why it is failing—lies in the lack of collaboration, personalization, and calibration to the industry job roles or latest trends. 

At Hack The Box, we challenge and rethink the approach to skills development with Enterprise Platform: a dedicated business environment for teams and leaders who take cybersecurity seriously.  

Our platform features are designed to serve the fabric of an organization and enable managers to identify practical learning outcomes for every activity. In the case of Toyota, a buddy system and “CTF Fridays” led to a massive knowledge improvement within 11 months thanks to continuous practice and assessments. Here is your not-so-secret way to develop and engage your cyber workforce with HTB!

Content search based on MITRE and NIST terminology

Organizations have the need to develop threat models, evaluate security tool efficacy, develop detection strategies, and prioritize security investments. For this reason, we carefully mapped our courses and labs to the MITRE ATT&CK and NIST NICE frameworks.

Managers using the HTB Enterprise Platform can easily search courses using MITRE terminology and assign them based on the techniques and tactics relevant to their teams.

This search feature works with specific MITRE tactics or techniques (for example, T1594 or Active Scanning) or with text keywords found in the course material. 

Easi, a European IT services partner with over 400 employees, successfully implemented a skills development program that directly applies to engagements with clients. The mapping of HTB Professional Labs to the MITRE ATT&CK matrix made it much easier to keep the training sessions as close to real-world scenarios as possible and empower a strong purple mindset. 

Flexible lab management and assignment

A great advantage of using HTB Enterprise Platform is that teams do not need to stick to pre-set learning paths. Managers have the capability to select and assign any of the 500+ labs to team members and define a tailored threat-connected development plan.

As an example, on October 3rd 2023, Qualys announced their discovery of CVE-2023-4911, otherwise known as Looney Tunables. The local privilege escalation vulnerability impacts the default installations of most major Linux distributions. 

Within a few days, the Hack The Box team released a Machine around this to help organizations remain threat-ready. Managers could assign this lab to team members with just a few clicks!

This flexible approach and lab management helped the RS2 team to achieve a 150% increase in training engagement, meet compliance needs, and operationalize intelligence within 6 months. 

Admin activity and progress tracking

How do we better understand if team members are making progress? The HTB Enterprise Platform activity tracker makes it easy for technical leaders to get a snapshot of the team's success by monitoring their engagement on a weekly and monthly basis.

Each value in the grid represents the number of actions mentioned on the left side that are performed on a specific day for the selected members. All data displayed refer to content and members currently assigned in the workspace.

Measurable metrics and progress indicators are one of the main reasons why the 8bit team managed to seamlessly onboard five junior team members, practicing on over 300 live targets in just 10 weeks.

Guided or exploratory? You decide

Let’s get one thing straight: it is okay to use write-ups. In any case, admins on HTB Enterprise Platform have the choice to enable or disable the following features that support a more guided learning approach for their team members. 

• Write-ups: Documents that list the methodologies and steps to undertake to complete a lab successfully. The official HTB write-ups, always available for business clients, include all the action steps needed—from reconnaissance to documentation and reporting.

• Guided Mode: An exclusive HTB feature designed to accelerate the learning curve of individuals. If enabled, a set of questions acting as guide paths will appear to show the intended path for each lab, coaching the user along to the root flag.

Admins can easily visualize the engagement of members in a lab with Guided Mode enabled and the labs assigned. Lack of progress with questions is an indicator to jump in to assist members in consuming the content. 

Since Guided Mode questions offer an easier and more granular way for members to upskill, we are confident managers will see more consistent progress and engagement with the setup they have in place.

Create an upskilling culture and boost performance

We can safely conclude that Hack The Box and modern technical leaders have the same goal: to create high-performing cyber teams continuously driven by a dynamic upskilling culture.

Our Customer Success, having empowered more than 1,500 technical teams around the globe, identifies these five practical steps as crucial to achieving a great workforce development outcome.

1. Schedule “quick-win” learning events with CTFs.

2. Commit to regular (ideally weekly) upskilling sessions.

3. Run regular post-mortems in the form of self-assessment or gamified TTXs.

4. Lower technical training debt with pre-built content and paths.

5. Iterate and prove the ROI of your upskilling program using reporting features.

There is no magic recipe to suddenly elevate the cyber skills of your team. The path to constant workforce development takes regular effort and time allocation. 

HTB Enterprise Platform provides extensive lab access, exclusive features, and the flexibility to model programs to the needs and objectives of your business.