Inside X-Force Command, IBM’s cutting-edge cyber security facility

Seated at a row of computers inside IBM’s new office in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., an unsuspecting employee has just clicked a malicious link in an email that has turned him into the latest victim of a pernicious phishing attack. The company it hit isn’t a company at all — it’s a simulated Fortune 500 environment inside the company’s new X-Force Command commercial cyber range. Comparable to something like a gun range, where marksmen go to sharpen their skills and improve their aim, IBM built this — as well as an affiliated data center with almost a petabyte of data running there — to make a point. Even as we bring 2016 to a close, a year that’s seen not just a wave of high-profile cyber attacks but attacks unprecedented in scope; with no less than the president announcing sweeping actions in recent days in response to Russian election-related hacking; the eye-poppingly large numbers of victims associated with massive hacks at Yahoo; and on and on it goes — even still, says IBM Security vice president Caleb Barlow, too many security professionals and business executives remain woefully unprepared to deal with a breach.It’s an old story. The details are the only thing that change. Sometimes, the outcome is big enough to swing a presidential election (the DNC attack). This time, though, the damage is contained, because the attack was a controlled experiment.