October 20, a test of actions of public and private sectors in Lithuania according to a scenario involving a high risk level cyber incident affecting a large part of the community and disrupting the supply of basic services was conducted out as part of Cyber Shield 2021, largest cyber defence exercise in Lithuania this year.
“Real-world examples demonstrate that a wide-scale cyber-attack is a realistic scenario and we need to be prepared for it. Exercises are a good opportunity to once again test-run interoperability among separate organisations, areas of responsibility, procedures, and to improve them is necessary,” says Vice Minister of National Defence Margiris Abukevičius.
According to the exercise scenario, one of the banks providing services in Lithuania is hit by a large-scope cyber-attack and e-banking services are denied to its clients as a result. The efforts to contain the cyber-attack within several hours fail and it reaches a perilous scope disrupting electronic services of the state to the majority of the public.
“As more and more services and activities are moved to the digital space, not only organisations but every user need to carefully assess their activity. As one of the exercise participants said at today’s meeting, everyone of us should ask themselves as soon as today what their actions would need to be lest their login and identification were no longer working. Also, a general recommendation to all users is to have an alternative or more than one way of accessing state or other e-services online,” says Director of the National Cyber Security Centre Rytis Rainys.
Over 60 public and private sector organisations are training in the largest cyber defence Exercise Cyber Shield 2021 this year. This is the first year smaller financial institutions that are members of the Association of Lithuanian banks have been invited to train at the event. The exercise objective is to test the participants’ practical readiness to expeditiously respond to and manage cyber-incidents of different types and scopes.
Cyber Shield 2021 co-organised by the National Cyber Security Centre under the Ministry of National Defence, Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and the KTU Lithuanian Science and Research Network Technical Centre.
Photo credit: Alfredas Pliadis/MoD
