Locked Shields 2022 - Multinational Cyber Defense Exercise

Exercise Locked Shields is a Red Team (RT) versus Blue Team (BT) exercise with teams formed by member nations and partners of NATO. In this year, there were 24 BTs participated in the fictitious “game,” with an average of 50 experts in each team. For the first time, Hungary participated as a multinational team in cooperation with Bulgaria.

The main goal of the exercise was to enable cyber defenders to practice collaboration and respond effectively to cyberchallenges under simulated conditions. In addition to the cyber defense sector, tactical and strategic decision making, the legal issues of events, and the media also played a significant role during the exercise.

The annual exercise provides a great opportunity for nations to practice how effectively and quickly they can respond to real-time, serious cyber attacks.

According to the scenario, the security situation of the fictional island country could deteriorating according to a predicted large number of coordinated cyber attacks against its military and civilian IT systems. These attacks could cause severe disruptions to government and military networks, communications, water purification systems, the electrical grid, virology systems and in the bank sector which could lead to public riots and protests.

Locked Shields, as the NATO’s largest cyber exercise, involved about 5,500 virtualized systems that were subject to near 8,000 attacks.