Australia to join cyber ‘war’ versus ‘Crimsonia’
‘‘Locked Shields is an important exercise to ensure the international community can detect and respond to cyber attacks, given recent incidents involving business and infrastructure.’’ Julie Bishop, Australian Foreign Minister
ESTONIA: Australia will join the world’s biggest ‘‘live fire’’ cyber war exercise, a week after Australia, the United States and Britain issued an extraordinary warning that Russian state-sponsored hackers were targeting key public and private infrastructure in Western countries.
The annual exercise, known as Locked Shields, takes place this week in Tallinn, Estonia, and tests the ability of government teams across the world to withstand a full-scale cyber attack.
This year’s Locked Shields will simulate a hostile co-ordinated cyber attack against a major civilian internet service provider and military airbase.
The US and UK believe Russia has been working to develop the capability to launch such a strike since at least 2015.
Last year the hostile state in the Locked Shields exercise was dubbed ‘‘Crimsonia’’ – literally a red menace – though organisers said it would not be ‘‘politically correct’’ to say it was modelled on Russia, and that other countries could have the same capability and intent.
The UK’s cyber security chief, Ciaran Martin, has called Russia ‘‘our most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace’’.
‘‘Locked Shields is an important exercise to ensure the international community can detect and respond to cyber attacks, given recent incidents involving business and infrastructure,’’ Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.
Bishop attended Locked Shields last year, and was so impressed she decided Australia should look to join in future years. This year it has sent an official observer, a senior officer from its Computer Emergency Response Team.
The Australian government will soon sign up to join Nato’s Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre (CCDCOE) in Tallinn, which runs the exercise. It brings together world-leading experts from military, government and industry backgrounds to develop cyber defence strategies and tools.
All CCDCOE members have approved Australia’s membership. Once it is formalised, Australia will send a permanent defence representative to the centre.
Last week the Australian government revealed that a ‘‘significant number of Australian organisations’’ had been hit by ‘‘malicious cyber activity’’ in a coordinated attack in 2017 traced back to ‘‘Russian state-sponsored actors’’.
Since 2015, the US and UK governments have received information that hackers supported by the Russian government have carried out a worldwide campaign to exploit security holes in the hardware that shuttles data around the internet. The hackers had modified the devices to leave them open to attack.
The news came as the UK and US put out an unprecedented joint ‘‘technical alert’’ which they said was the result of analysis by the US Department of Homeland Security and FBI, and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.
According to the alert, the FBI and NCSC had ‘‘high confidence that Russian state-sponsored cyber attacks’’ had compromised routers – the basic infrastructure of the internet – in order to ‘‘support espionage, extract intellectual property . . . and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations’’.
Australia has opened a ‘‘popup’’ embassy in Tallinn to capitalise on Locked Shields.