What is the CyberEurope2014 and why is it so important?

Cyber security is considered today a pillar for the stability of any government, a growing number of cyber attacks every day hit private companies, government entities and critical infrastructure, these offensive appear even more sophisticated and need a prompts and efficient response.

More than 200 organizations and 400 cyber-security professionals from 29 European countries have been involved in the biggest ever cyber security exercise in Europe, the participant was engaged in a day-long simulation, organized by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), which intend to evaluate the quality of the response to the cyber threats and the capabilities to mitigate them.

As a part of Cyber Europe 2014, ENISA and all the participant will coordinate their efforts to test the resilience of IT infrastructure and response capacity at various levels in case of a major cyber attack.

Cyber Europe 2014 (CyberEurope2014) this is the name of the exercise organized by ENISA, involved experts from the public and private sectors including cyber security agencies, national CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Teams),  telecoms companies, energy companies, ministries, financial institutions and internet service providers. The CyberEurope2014 exercise was distributed across different countries in Europe, which is coordinated by a central exercise control center.

The cyber security experts know that the above categories are always involved with different roles in large-scale attack campaign, for this reason the ENISA decided to test their procedures and capabilities in a simulation that stressed them.

The exercise is very complex, the experts which organized the #CyberEurope2014 simulated the concurrence of more than 2000 separate cyber-incidents. The casuistry is wide and includes different categories of attacks, including denial of service attacks against online services, cyber espionage campaigns, and attack against critical infrastructure.

A similar initiative was already arranged five years ago, as explained by the Executive Director of ENISA, Professor Udo Helmbrecht, commented:

Critical infrastructure protection is one of the element of major concerns for governments, recently the number of cyber attacks against these architectures is increased and long-term cyber operations are targeting their systems, in many cases going under the radar for years.