NATO Center to Conduct Cyber War Games
The Tallinn-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence will be carrying out a multinational exercise from March 26 to 28 designed to train IT experts and other specialists in the practical aspects of fending off cyber attacks.
The exercise, Locked Shields 2012, involves a Red Team made up mainly of volunteers from Estonia and Finland attacking nine separate Blue Teams located in countries throughout Europe. There will be Blue Teams from Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy and Slovakia as well as a combined German-Austrian team, a Danish-Norwegian team and a NATO team, the center said in a statement.
Each Blue Team, which is made up of specialists from governmental organizations, military units, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and private sector companies, will take part in a simulation where they have to defend a small telecommunications company's network. No real organizations will play their actual role in the fictional scenario.
"They are expected to defend and secure their networks by technical means, but also to be capable of providing adequate information to the media, to report observations and detected incidents to CERT, to write summaries to the management in order to assess the impact of attacks to the business and to respond to requests from clients and users," the center said.
Beyond training, the purpose of the exercise is to learn from how the teams respond, and create technical infrastructure that can be used in future exercises, according to the statement.
Steve Roman