Romania in NATO’s Cyber Coalition 2018 Defense Exercise

Cyber Coalition 2018, the most important cyber defense exercise organized by NATO, with the Coordination Center in Tartu, Estonia, takes place between 26-30 November 2018. Exercise is planned by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), headed by NATO Military Committee, and has as its primary objective training and testing of the Alliance's ability to defend NATO and national networks against third-party challenges when operating in an open field of cyber confrontation.

Now in its 11th year, Cyber Coalition involves around 700 participants from Allies, partners, industry and academia.

Exercise aims to enhance coordination and collaboration between NATO and Allies, strengthen the ability to protect Alliance cyberspace, and conduct military operations in the cyber domain. It will also test NATO and national procedures on information sharing, situational awareness in cyberspace, and decision-making.

Event is attended by representatives from all member countries of the Alliance, both from the military and from the private and academic world. It is a distributed-system exercise, and each nation participates from the national territory by securely connecting to the cyber-network provided by Estonian Ministry of Defense and configured for this exercise by the CyberInt Center of the Romanian Intelligence Service, states a press release from the Romanian Ministry of Defense (MApN).

Romania participates with a team of over 70 people coordinated by the Ministry of National Defense, acting at the Center for Excellence in Advanced Cyber Security Technology at the Military Technical Academy in Bucharest.

Romanian team consists of representatives of Ministry of National Defense, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Romanian Intelligence Service, Special Telecommunications Service, Protection and Guard Service, Foreign Intelligence Service, CERT-RO (National Cyber Security Incident Response Center) Avira, Bitdefender, Deloitte, Oracle, Provision, Safetech, and SecureWorks.

Purpose of the exercise is to practice quick coordination procedures and measures between national and Alliance experts who use their skills to manage a series of scenarios that have been growing steadily in recent years. Using a virtually controlled environment, all participants have to go through scenarios that involve complex threats and need to provide solutions.

Source:RRA, NATO.Translated by Miruna Matei