Virtual Blue Team/Red Team Tabletop Exercise Advancements Using Avert Virtual Tabletop (AVERT-VT)

Security tabletops and Force on Force (FOF) drills and exercises (both full and limited scope) are very beneficial for assessing and improving security posture. While tabletops can involve only a few individuals at a time, larger scale FOF drills and exercises need to engage many participants simultaneously to test and validate the overall protective strategy and all of the required supporting activities. However, during pandemic times, such as COVID-19, doing live FOF exercises with multiple team members and different security teams participating at the same time (i.e., > 10 in a given location) can result in increased and unacceptable risk of exposure. This results in postponing FOF exercises and it risks deterioration of security personnel’s protective strategy knowledge. FOF drills are expensive and time-consuming activities that can benefit from the use of modern modeling, simulation and gaming technologies. Using the same technology that is deployed for multi-player video games, performing FOF using software in a virtual environment offers several advantages including addressing COVID-19 social distancing. In the fall of 2020, ARES Security Corporation (ARES) deployed the first commercial version of AVERT Virtual Tabletop (AVERT-VT) to Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island nuclear plant, which is located outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. AVERT-VT provides an interactive environment for security forces (Blue Team), hostile forces (Red Team) and the exercise facilitator to walk through and respond to a threat scenario. This exercise environment is based upon the integration of ARES’ AVERT Physical Security (AVERT-PS) modeling and simulation software and AVERT Command and Control (AVERT-C2) software, both of which have large market deployments. This paper will present the AVERT-VT software, discuss the benefits and provide insights and lessons learned from the Prairie Island deployment.