Cympire and Cyberspace Knowledge Group Deliver Live-Fire Enterprise Defense Training at Cyber Yankee 2026

Multi-service cyber operators completed live-fire training at Camp Nett, May 4-15, 2026, simulating an adversary campaign on a Fortune 500 network.

ORLANDO, FL, UNITED STATES, May 29, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Cympire and Cyberspace Knowledge Group (CKG) today jointly announced that the Cympire Platform (CyWARIA™) served as the training cyber range for Cyber Yankee 2026, the National Guard's premier regional exercise for critical infrastructure defense. Held May 4–15, 2026, at Camp Nett in Niantic, Connecticut, the Cympire and CKG team delivered a series of team and individual refresher training range modules culminating in a live-fire simulation of a sophisticated adversary campaign against a Fortune 500 enterprise network — purpose-built to address the gap between scheduled platform-based collective training and operator-level skill currency.

Cyber Yankee is one of the most established and operationally relevant cyber exercises in the National Guard's exercise portfolio, bringing together cyber operators from across the services, the interagency, and utility-industry partners to train under realistic, large-scale attack conditions on critical infrastructure. The selection of the Cympire Platform for the 2026 iteration reflects its ability to scale to multi-service participation, to model sophisticated adversary tradecraft against critical infrastructure environments, and to deliver a unified red / blue / orange cell training experience in a single environment.
Hundreds of cyber operators from Army National Guard and Air National Guard units, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Space Force, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, and civilian agencies participated in the exercise, alongside utility-industry partners contributing to scenario realism and cross-sector coordination. National Guard participants represented units from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. The exercise also included international partners from the Department of War National Guard Bureau State Partnership Program, representing Cyprus, Brazil, El Salvador, Kenya, Paraguay, Uruguay, Canada, and Sweden. Civilian and interagency participants included ten private industry companies, the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Participants consumed more than 750 challenges and logged more than 5,000 hours of training inside the Cympire environment — with a single scenario drawing more than 150 simultaneous participants. The platform supported hundreds of cloud instances, thousands of virtual networks, and tens of thousands of vCPUs to sustain the exercise at scale. Exercise personnel executed adversary engagement and defensive operations, testing their ability to detect, contain, and recover from a sophisticated, persistent cyber campaign against critical infrastructure.
The exercise was delivered jointly by Cympire and Cyberspace Knowledge Group (CKG). CKG, led by Founder and President Richard Berthao, a retired Colonel of the Massachusetts Army National Guard and founder of Cyber Yankee, brought operational depth and long-standing relationships across the Guard and joint cyber community — contributions that translated directly into the realism and training value of the exercise. CyberProAI provided additional exercise support personnel alongside CKG.

The Exercise Director, Col. Cameron Sprague of the Connecticut Air National Guard, said: “Cympire's CyWARIA environment has fidelity that fits the training development and is very responsive to immediate changes.”

Richard Berthao, Founder and President of Cyberspace Knowledge Group and retired Colonel, Massachusetts Army National Guard, said: “Cyber Yankee demands a training environment that mirrors the speed, scale, and complexity of real adversary operations against critical infrastructure. The Cympire Platform delivered that for our operators — and the partnership between Cympire, CKG, and the exercise leadership is exactly the kind of joint effort the Guard cyber community needs more of.”

Cympire Co-founder and CEO Yaniv Shachar said: “Cyber Yankee is the bar for joint, multi-service cyber readiness against sophisticated threats to critical infrastructure. Supporting hundreds of operators across the Guard, Air Force, Space Force, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard, and civilian agencies in a single live-fire environment is exactly what the Cympire Platform was built for. We're proud to stand alongside the men and women defending the networks the country depends on.”

Cyber Yankee 2026 joins a growing roster of U.S. Government engagements supported by the Cympire Platform and ongoing federal and educational deployments.

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About Cympire

Cympire, part of the CyberproAI Group, is a global cybersecurity training company delivering the AI-powered, cloud-native Cympire Platform (CyWARIA™) — a cyber range and simulation environment trusted by governments, enterprises, and higher-education institutions around the world. More than 100,000 IT and cyber professionals have trained on the Cympire Platform, including personnel from the U.S. Department of Defense, federal agencies, allied governments, and leading universities. Cympire products are available through Carahsoft Technology Corp. on NASA SEWP V, ITES-SW2, NASPO ValuePoint, OMNIA Partners, TIPS, E&I Cooperative, and the Quilt.

About Cyberspace Knowledge Group

Cyberspace Knowledge Group (CKG) is a U.S.-based cybersecurity readiness and exercise-support firm delivering joint, multi-service cyber training architecture for the National Guard, the broader Department of War cyber community, and federal and state partners. Led by Founder and President Richard Berthao — a retired Colonel of the Massachusetts Army National Guard and founder of the Cyber Yankee exercise — CKG designs and executes cyber readiness events, providing exercise architecture, scenario and storyline development, training-week execution support, and after-action analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of operational experience with Guard cyber readiness, CKG's framework is positioned as an institutionalized, repeatable model for joint cyber exercise support nationwide, with active engagement across National Guard, joint cyber, and interagency stakeholders.

Press contacts

Cympire — Ary Nussbaum, General Manager, Cympire, Inc. — press@cympire.com
Cyberspace Knowledge Group — Richard Berthao, Founder and President — rich@cyberskg.com

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