Disaster Avoidance and Recovery Rehearsal Tool (DARRT)

Information Security and Assurance Corporation (ISAC, Inc.) proposes the development of a dynamic Disaster Avoidance and Recovery Rehearsal Tool (DARRT) to assist GMD information infrastructure providers in conducting on-demand disaster response rehearsals. According to the Department of Homeland Security, "Efforts to develop software and systems that are more secure will take time to pay dividends, and even in the best case the nation's critical information infrastructure will remain vulnerable to serious attack for some time". In this environment, network managers must be prepared to respond to catastrophic attacks, designed to take down entire networks. DARRT provides a virtual rehearsal environment that realistically and accurately reflects the actual network and disaster response features present in the GMD system. DARRT enables network managers to avoid or drastically reduce outage times by providing a virtual cyber warrior "battle drill" capability to train operators to rapidly and appropriately respond to most dangerous and most likely threat scenarios. In addition to pre-disaster rehearsal, DARRT can also be used by network managers during actual attacks to initiate and guide disaster response activities. DARRT consists of five modules:  Disaster Scenarios  Disaster Planning  Disaster Simulation  Disaster Rehearsal  Performance Evaluation and Assessment