NATO’s big, multi-day cyber defense exercise is set to bring together technical experts from coalition countries and Ukraine, nearly two months after Russia’s invasion.
The annual cyber wargame, known as the Locked Shields exercise, begins Tuesday in Tallinn, Estonia. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence organizes the event, which consists of hypothetical cyberattack exercises that test teams have to stop under time pressure.
Annette Numa, an international policy adviser in the Cyber Policy Unit of Estonia’s Defense Ministry, said this year’s competition is important for the participating countries as their cyber defense units have been on high alert since the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
“Like-minded countries have to work together to defend themselves,” Ms Numa said. He added that Ukrainian and Estonian experts will work on the same team in the exercise.
Finland’s government websites were attacked on 8 April while the government was discussing joining NATO. Ukrainian government websites were hacked in January while Russian soldiers gathered around the country’s borders. “Every single political decision can lead to an attack,” Ms Numa said, referring to current discussions in Finland about joining NATO. Estonia also experienced a massive cyber attack in 2007.
NATO officials are discussing various ways the coalition could help protect Ukraine from cyberattacks, and in January gave the country access to its malware information-sharing platform. In February, US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger traveled to Brussels and Warsaw to discuss Russian cyber threats with officials from NATO, the European Union, Poland and the Baltic countries.
Ian West, head of the NATO Cyber Security Center, which guards NATO, said the NATO coalition team includes about 30 cyber guards from various NATO bodies and member states, including communications, digital forensics, legal expertise and systems damaged by the attack. is included. Network and is a part of the organization’s communication and information agency.
Mr West said the exercise is useful for cyber defenders from different countries to communicate with each other about attacks on the same technology products that many governments use. “We all use commercial off-the-shelf systems. We are all using the same technology and as we know, many of these technologies hit the market and unfortunately they are vulnerable.”
The NATO center that organizes Locked Shields does not make public the details of the fake cyberattack. This year’s exercise will focus on “interdependencies among national IT systems”, it said in a statement. War games do not draw on elements of recent cyber attacks in Ukraine as they were very recent, but the exercises generally include scenarios that have occurred in actual cyber attacks, Ms Numa said.
In 2021, more than 2,000 participants took part in a simulation that tested how a country could respond to a massive cyberattack on its financial system and keep critical functions such as payments running.
The advantage of the exercise is that it sets a baseline for participants to measure their cyber defense skills against each other, said Stefan Sosanto, a senior cyber defense researcher at ETH Zurich.
He said that sports help experts to get to know their counterparts in the respective countries. “They’re building a great alliance with the partners behind them. If things happen, you can count on them to help you,” he said.