SRI as co-organizer of 2020 NATO Cyber Coalition

19 November 2020

Since 2013, SRI represented by Cyberint National Center, has been actively involved in planning NATO Cyber Coalition exercise, as a scenario developer and administrator of NATO cyber test site.

Cyber Coalition is the largest cyber defense exercise annually organized under NATO and this year edition is taking place between 16 and 20 November. The exercise is intended to increase the defense capability of NATO cyber networks, to train the actors involved and endorse cooperation between decision-makers in case of cyber-attacks, and also to test NATO operational processes or national cyber security defense capabilities.

The main characteristic of the scenario developed by Cyberint specialists is that attacks are running in real time within networks customized by SRI specialists, so that the exercise should appear similar to the cyberattacks that have taken place lately. The actual cyber environment has been transposed into the exercise scenario by SRI specialists. For instance, they used spear-phishing messages which allegedly referred to statistics about SAR-CoV-2, but, in fact, they were meant to extract information from the target workstation.

Due to precautions enacted because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year edition of Cyber Coalition was planned and took place exclusively on line, over 1000 officials and experts from NATO member states being involved in scenarios and exercise.