The team from Finland wins the largest and most complex international live-fire cyber defence exercise Locked Shields 2022. The joint team Lithuania-Poland takes second place and Estonian-Georgian joint team comes third.
“It was a very close run. The winning team demonstrated solid defence against network and web attacks and they excelled in situation reporting. Overall they scored above average in all categories and this is one of the important aims of Locked Shields. The most successful are teams who manage to tackle all challenges in different categories as the strategic decision makers and technicians will have to work together to properly address all the elements of a large-scale cyber-attack,” said Carry Kangur, Head of Cyber Exercises at the CCDCOE.
“All 24 participating teams can consider themselves winners as hopefully they will go home with a valuable, cutting-edge and relevant training experience that only Locked Shields can offer since it provides a unique opportunity for teams to test their skills in a safe environment. Every year we see the performance of the Blue teams improving. They are getting more organised as they demonstrate strong leadership and good integration in both technical and non-technical skills,” added Kangur.
This year the exercise evolved around 5500 virtualised systems that were subject to more than 8000 live-fire attacks. In addition, the teams had to be effective in reporting incidents, executing strategic decisions and solving forensic, legal and information operations challenges.
“This year we had the opportunity to plan the Exercise mostly on-site and less remote as the COVID-19 situation has eased. Additionally, there were quite a few new partners introduced, which made the organising of the exercise that much easier,” said Kangur.
Locked Shields 2022 was organised by CCDCOE in cooperation with NATO, Siemens; TalTech; Clarified Security; Arctic Security; CR14. The Centre also acknowledges the unique elements added to Locked Shields 2022 by Microsoft, the Financial Service Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS ISAC), SpaceIT, Fortinet.
