The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced Monday that the NATO “Blue team,” made up of 30 cyber defenders, won Locked Shields 2018, the world’s largest live-fire cyber exercise.
The exercise required participants to counter high-intensity attacks on a fictitious country’s IT systems and critical infrastructure networks. Teams had to maintain the IT systems while reporting incidents, managing crises, making strategic decisions, solving digital forensics tasks and dealing with other challenges. The exercise involved a total of 4,000 virtualized systems and more than 2,500 attacks.
“This year’s exercise was even more realistic and certainly tougher than ever before and we are incredibly proud of our NATO cyber defenders,” Ian West, cybersecurity chief at the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency, said.
French and Czech teams took second and third place, respectively. More than 1,000 experts from nearly 30 nations participated in the event.
“I could not be more proud of the success of our cyber-team that once again demonstrated the expertise of NATO’s technology agency,” Kevin J. Scheid, General Manager of the NCI Agency, said. “They are hard-working, dedicated and ready 24/7 to defend NATO networks.”