NATO Cyber Defence Exercise

The exercise was preceded by nearly one year of planning and organizing work. The tasks to be tackled might as well be real-world ones, and are focused on dealing with situations as part of daily duties. As a Hungarian feature of the cyber defence exercise, like in recent similar exercises, the MoI National Security Authority played an active role in planning and control again as an organization with cyber defence liaison duties.

Held prior to the cyber defence exercise, a series of four scripting conferences facilitated the identification of national and common goals and the drawing up of a main event/incident list for a joint action based on a fictitious geopolitical scenario, in line with NATO’s set of tasks. Hungary was represented on the exercise by the Defence Staff CIS and INFOSEC Directorate, designated elements of the HDF vitéz Szurmay Sándor Budapest Garrison Brigade, and designated staff of the MoD Legal Department and the Military National Security Service.

Concurrent with the central opening in Tartu, an opening ceremony was organized for the Hungarian participants, where Col. Dr. Károly Kassai, head of the INFOSEC Department of the Directorate welcomed the participants on behalf of Brig.-Gen. Sándor Vass. From the viewpoint of the military operating personnel, the cyber defence exercise focused on testing existing capabilities and verifying processes. During the organizational phase, an important basic principle was that the exercise should be serviced by the personnel having everyday duties, so only a national military coordinating element had to be set up as an exercise-specific complement.

The exercise control (EXCON) staff was located in Tartu, where the participants delegated liaison officers to maintain contact. Hungary delegated two senior officers from the Directorate as national military professional representatives. As compared to earlier years, the biggest change concerned the exercise control, as this task has been assigned to the NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) since 2014. The ACT is in charge of providing a simulation environment which mirrors real-world situations. Accordingly, the agreement with the Estonian Ministry of Defence, reached at NATO’s Wales Summit in September, provides that the virtual Cyber Range can be used as a NATO Cyber Range Capability too. This capability allows NATO to conduct exercises and training to respond to continuously changing threats in a simulated environment in the long run.

Beyond professional technical challenges of cyber defence, the objective of the exercise was to maintain the flow of information in NATO in the interest of coordinating available capabilities. The nations were allowed to apply common-use equipment and procedures to deal with technical problems. There were opportunities to find new partners and to test and further develop the national cyber defence capabilities of NATO organizations, member countries and partner countries in cooperation with each other, which offers common cost-effective technical solutions.

In line with NATO’s strategic-level partnership goals, this year’s cyber defence exercise offered a chance to involve representatives of industry, academia and research institutions, in addition to the national and national military incident response centers. The analysis of the lessons learned will take weeks, and the knowledge acquired has to be incorporated into the incident management scheme of the HDF Separated Government Network, and to the support system of real-world operation.