Locked Shields, the largest international cyber defense exercise, was recently held in Tallinn, Estonia. The NATO Cyber Defense Cooperation Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) has been organizing this annual exercise since 2010 to examine the possibilities cybersecurity of NATO member countries. It took more than six months to prepare this exercise.
Its aim was to strengthen the Alliance's collective cyber defense policy and test the Allies' skills. Participants had a unique opportunity to demonstrate their ability to protect national civilian and military IT systems and critical infrastructure.
The Locked Shields 2022 exercise deployed approximately 5.500 virtual systems in more than 8.000 attacks. However, the exercise is considered important not so much for its size as for its complexity.
The teams involved had to not only demonstrate their ability to protect the critical infrastructure of a fictional country, but also their effectiveness in reporting details about the situation on the digital battlefield, executing strategic decisions and solving legal and information operational challenges. For the first time, in 2022, the technical exercise also included its simulation managementof a central bank's reserves and systems.
The exercise focused mainly on the interdependencies of international information systems.
This year, more than 2.000 people from 32 countries took part in the exercise. Twenty-four countries were members of NATO, including the Slovak Republic team, which participates in the exercise each year and to which in 2022 cybersecurity experts from the Czech Republic were added. As there was great interest, many countries joined forces to form joint groups, such as Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Poland, and Estonia and Georgia.
ESET had the opportunity to join the Slovak team in this exercise and thus prove to be a valuable member and partner of the country.
The Slovak-Czech team was formed by experts from the armed forces, government agencies and the private sector, including cybersecurity company ESET. Twenty-nine ESET security experts participated in the exercise, helping the SK-CZ team finish fifth overall and first in two sub-categories.
“Once again, the ESET team demonstrated their technical expertise in the Locked Shields 2022 exercise and helped the Slovak-Czech blue team achieve a very good ranking. The productESET's solutions had high incident detection efficiency and allowed us to proactively respond to emerging threats in a short period of time. I express my thanks to all involved for their participation and high level of professionalism", said the director of the Cyber Defense Center of the Slovak Republic.
The need for cyber security is becoming more and more apparent, data of current events such as the invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. As the global community becomes increasingly dependent on technology, malicious actors are increasing their efforts to attack both the public and private sectors. In response, Exercise Locked Shields uses the latest technologies to train national teams in a realistic scenario-based environment.
