On 15 May 2019, the EU Agency for Cybersecurity ENISA organised and participated in CyberSOPEx2019, the second dedicated cooperation exercise of the EU CSIRTs Network (CNW).
The role of ENISA was twofold. On the one hand, the CSIRT Relations team actively participated as the secretariat of CNW, as defined by the NIS Directive. In this regard, ENISA provides overall support to CNW and manages tools for cooperation among all members. On the other hand, ENISA’s exercise team, which also organises the pan-European ‘Cyber Europe’ exercise, organised the exercise, including the definition of the scenario and injects, and controlled the execution.
CSIRT teams from 27 countries, CERT-EU and ENISA played a scenario where cyber-attacks were performed over critical infrastructures before and during European elections. Several operators of essential services across different Member States were the ‘target’ of the attacks, and some incidents tried to diminish trust in the electoral process. Over 50 incident-handling experts from the EU Member States participated in this exercise.
CyberSOPex2019 proved once more how fundamental in developing confidence and trust among Member States the CNW is, promoting swift and effective operational cooperation.
The CyberSOPEx type of exercise is an important part of ENISA’s continuous efforts to improve the large-scale incident response collaboration of the CSIRTs Network members, by focusing on training participants on situational awareness, information sharing, understanding roles and procedures, and utilising CSIRTs Network-related tools just like in a real life situation.
For more info on the CSIRTs Network, visit www.csirtsnetwork.eu
For more information on the ENISA’s exercises contact: exercises@enisa.europa.eu
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