Like every year since 2010, NATO is organizing a “wargame”, Locked Shields, ” the world’s largest and most complex live cyber defense exercise » According to the Alliance. The 2022 edition, launched on April 19 and completed on April 22, is inevitably marked by the war in Ukraine.
The weighty context of Locked Shields 2022
A spokesperson for the Cyber Defense Coordination Center of Excellence (CCD COE) confirmed to Gizmodo the special flavor of this meeting, ” This year’s exercise is important for the participating countries, as their cyber defense units have been on high alert since the start of the war in Ukraine. “.
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Ukraine, although a non-NATO member, has been invited to the event. Its representatives are teaming up with Estonia, host country of the exercise and the CCD COE, reputed to be the most digitized in the world.
The ties between Ukraine and Locked Shields end here. The situation in the country, Russian attacks on telecom operators or the power grid, did not serve as a model for the 2022 trials. Although “ Exercise planners use the current geopolitical situation to develop realistic and challenging scenarios explains the press release of the organization, the conflict is too recent to be integrated.
#LockedShields2022 week is here! Final preparations for the annual largest and most complex international live-fire cyber defense exercise in the world, preceded by 6 months of planning between #CCDCOEour industry partners and participating nations?https://t.co/bqpYWArzmk
—NATO CCDCOE (@ccdcoe) April 18, 2022
The 2,000 experts, representing 30 countries, will be immersed in Berylia, a fictional island country, where ” A number of hostile events coincided with coordinated cyberattacks against major military and civilian computer systems “.
The purpose of the event according to the statement of the CCD COE is ” to practice cooperation in crisis situations between civilian and military units, as well as between the public and private sectors, because in the event of a large-scale cyberattack, these tactical and strategic decision-makers must work together “.
In the wall street journalIan West, Head of NATO’s Security Center, said, ” We all use off-the-shelf commercial systems. We all use the same technology and as we know many of these technologies are coming to market and are unfortunately vulnerable “.
NATO to the aid of the island state of Berylia!
This year’s theme is “interdependencies between national computer systems”. The details of the exercises themselves are still secret, but Gizmodo was told that a central bank’s financial messaging systems would be involved with, for the first time, that of a 5G autonomous mobile communications platform.
In 2021, the participants had to react to a major cyberattack against the financial system of a given country, perhaps that of the unfortunate Berylia. The participants of the Blue Teams, the teams in charge of the defense, each had to face 4,000 attacks and maintain 140 complex systems in operation. The Red Teams, in charge of the attack, had to try to compromise electrical networks, satellite mission controls, anti-aircraft defenses, water purification stations, communication systems…
DAY1 of #LockedShields2022 is DONE! Everything going as planned, systems are holding up and training audience is heavily engaged in all defense aspects. DAY2 brings more action as Strategic Decision-Making track comes along. DAY1 in??https://t.co/EticVXlYJh pic.twitter.com/0DybN1Ulos
—NATO CCDCOE (@ccdcoe) April 20, 2022
Bring home the cup, go blues, go!
The exercise is doubled by a competition where points are obtained in each event. In 2021 Sweden won the most points, followed by Finland and the Czech Republic. Small point of prize list (and cocorico), France won in 2018.
France will once again try to bring the cup home. COMCYBER, the cyber defense command, will lead a Franco-European team, with the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI) and CERT-EU, the emergency response team computers of the Old Continent. The spirit of competition is present among the French representatives, on the Blue Team side, of course. In a LinkedIn post COMCYBER takes the trouble to mention that, “ this exercise of cooperation also remains a competition between the countries involved “.
A dose of refreshing lightness in such a tense international context: on April 8, Finland suffered a cyberattack while its government was discussing the possibility of joining NATO (the state has an “associate” country status). Ukraine remains, unsurprisingly, the country most concerned by the war, cyber or not.