Over 75 Romanian specialists attending Cyber Coalition 2019 NATO cyber defence exercise

Over 75 Romanian specialists, coordinated by the Cyber Defence Agency with the Cyber Defence Command of Romania's Ministry of National Defence are taking part in the Cyber Coalition 2019, the most important cyber defence exercise conducted by NATO, December 2-5, coordinated from Tartu, Estonia. 

"The exercise, planned by the Allied Command Transformation and led by the NATO Military Committee, is designed to train and test NATO's responsiveness in defending critical infrastructure against third-party challenges when operating in an area open to cyber confrontations," the Romanian National Defence Ministry (MApN) reported on Wednesday. 

The exercise aims to improve collaboration and coordination between national and NATO experts by practicing procedures and measures to quickly respond to cyber security incidents. 

"Experts will use their technical skills to manage a number of scenarios whose complexity has increased greatly in recent years. Using a controlled and secure virtual environment, all participants have to act according to scenarios that entail complex vulnerabilities, threats and risks to provide prompt solutions," according to MApN. 

The exercise is attended by representatives for all NATO member countries, for the NATO Communications and Information Agency, NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, specialists from the military as well as from the private and academic communities, as well as representatives for countries that are not NATO member states. The exercise is of distributed type, with each nation dispatching a national team by securely connecting to the cyber range with Estonia's Ministry of Defence, a network configured for this exercise by the Cyberint Centre of the Romanian Intelligence Service. 

The Romanian specialists come from the Defence Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Guard and Protection Service, the Romanian Intelligence Service, the Special Telecommunications Service, CERT-RO (Romanian National Computer Security Incident Response Team). In addition, private partners with expertise in cyber security from Bitdefender, Certsign, Oracle, Provision, Safetech and Secureworks are also involved