Our talented security engineers and researchers took part once again in the exercise Locked Shields organised by CCDCOE to put their skills to the test. The focus is on realistic scenarios, cutting-edge technologies and simulating the entire complexity of a massive cyber incident, including strategic decision-making, legal and communication aspects.
Aivo Toots, one of Cybernetica’s security engineers, summed up the competition:
“As a cybersecurity engineer from Cybernetica, I participated in the Locked Shields competition along with my colleagues. We took part in the preparatory competition in March, as the main competition takes place in April and uses the same infrastructure and tasks. The aim of our participation was to showcase Cybernetica, develop ourselves and our team, and challenge ourselves. Locked Shields is a highly prestigious event in the cybersecurity field, and we were proud to participate.
We participated in the blue team, which is the defensive team. This was a good experience for us, as our department usually offers security testing services, which is more of a red (attacker) role. Participating in the blue team gave us a practical experience of how systems are protected from cyber attacks.
The preliminary competition did not consist of national teams, but various universities and large companies. There were ten separate blue teams, including Estonian teams such as TalTech, University of Tartu, and Telia. We represented University of Tartu in the team. The first place was won by a team from Singapore.
More than 500 participants attended the competition, including all teams. Cybernetica had 11 engineers and scientists participating.
The task of the competition was to repel massive cyber attacks on the fictional country of Berylia, which had fallen victim to coordinated cyber attacks. The blue teams had to identify the systems that were attacked, report their findings, react to the attacks in real-time, and fix the systems to offer better communication to the users. The competition took place in a closed system in a virtual environment, with the attacks happening as waves in real-time.
We were part of the University of Tartu team, which came in third place in the competition. Although we were well behind the first-place team, we were only marginally behind the second-place team (Telia), and the fourth-place team was far behind us. Overall, we were very satisfied with our performance and considered it a great achievement.”
Cybernetica's security engineers Renee and Urmas working at the competition