Cyber Europe 2014, a cybersecurity exercise, kicked off...

Cyber Europe 2014, a cybersecurity exercise, kicked off Monday under the aegis of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). In this first of three phases of ENISA’s biannual cyber-exercise, participants -- including 29 EU and European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA) countries, computer security incident response teams, cybersecurity agencies, EU bodies, public entities, telecom operators and information and communication technology (ICT) vendors -- will try to resolve several large-scale technical cyberincidents similar to real-life cases, ENISA said in a Q&A document (http://bit.ly/S1fjJq). The next two stages will check the resilience of IT systems and response capacity at the operational and political levels, it said. This is a two-day exercise, ENISA said. Aggregated results “will be announced in overarching terms” at year’s end, ENISA Executive Director Udo Helmbrecht told us by email. The scenarios are “based on realistic potential incidents,” he said. The exercise goals are to: (1) Test how governments and industry work together on resilience of IT systems and response capacity in cases of serious cross-border security threats. (2) Check standard cooperation procedures in the EU. (3) Train and test national-level capabilities and see how effectively private-public and private-private players collaborate. (4) Analyze how events escalate and de-escalate; and understand those processes at all technical, operational and strategic levels as well as related public affairs issues linked to cyberthreats. The exercise wasn’t influenced by events in Russia and Ukraine, ENISA said in news release.