A new report from the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has shown a significant increase in the number of European countries participating in national cyber security exercises.
The report from ENISA – Europe’s cyber security agency – shows that 22 of 31 European countries have carried out a national cyber security exercise between 2002 and 2012.
The percentage of countries in the EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) that have taken part in a national cyber security exercise has increased from 63% in 2010 to 71% in 2012.
The UK has only held one such exercise in this 10 year period.
Private-public cooperation
The report comes just days after a Hewlett-Packard report revealed the cost of cybercrime has soared by nearly 40% since 2010.
The ENISA report has made a series of recommendations including the exchange of good practice for cyber exercises between public and private sectors.
The analysis showed that over half of the exercises that have been carried out have had involvement from the public and private sectors with ENISA predicting this will only increase due to the fact that private stakeholders play a ‘critical role’ in the area of cyber crisis cooperation.
This cooperation is important as the ownership of most of the critical information infrastructure (servers etc.) is in the private sector.
Among the other recommendations were:
- Establish a more integrated global cyber exercise community;
- Support development of exercise management tools for better exercise planning, execution and evaluation;
- Conduct more complex cyber-exercises at inter-sectorial, international and European levels;
- Exercises should be included in the lifecycle of national cyber crisis contingency plans;
- Promote the good practices for national exercises, and initiate a step-by-step methodology for cross-border cyber-exercises;
- Develop feedback mechanisms for ensuring that lessons are learned from cyber-exercises.
- Around two-thirds of the 85 cyber security exercises that European countries were involved in were multinational exercises.
According to ENISA: “This indicates a tendency for international cooperation, although national security matters usually are domestic concerns.”
The Executive Director of ENISA, Professor Udo Helmbrecht, said: “The ENISA study shows that a broad consensus exists for cyber-exercises being an essential instrument to assess the preparedness of a community against cyber crises, and to enhance the responsiveness of stakeholders against critical information infrastructure incidents.
“Based on the report results we will see a growing number of multinational exercises, like our recent Cyber Europe 2012, also involving the private sector.”
You can read the full ENISA National and International Cyber Security Survey, Analysis & Recommendations here.