NATO-linked center to hold ‘Live-Fire’ cyber drills

A cyber organization accredited by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will conduct what it bills as the largest and most complex "live-fire" cyber defense exercises in the world beginning on Tuesday, Report informs, citing Bloomberg.

The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, which is based in Estonia, said the annual event, called Locked Shields, is intended to boost the skills of cybersecurity experts defending national IT systems and critical infrastructure under real-time attacks.

The participants are deployed to assist a fictional country in handling a large-scale cyberattack. More than 2,000 people from 32 nations, including Ukraine, are expected to be involved.

This year's Locked Shields event comes amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, in which hacking has had a constant, if relatively muted, role in Russia's invasion. Russian state-sponsored hackers have been accused of attacking Ukrainian government agencies and attempting to breach the power grid.

Ukrainian companies have also been subject to regular cyberattacks, according to government officials.

Among the participants this year will be five to 10 large financial institutions, including Mastercard Inc. and Banco Santander SA, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or FS-ISAC, which helped design the virtual systems to look realistic and the simulated attacks on the sector.