US, NZ and Australian Defence forces unite for groundbreaking cyber warfare exercise
US, Australian and New Zealand defence forces have united for their first-ever joint cyber warfare exercise to protect critical infrastructure from digital attacks. Read the details.
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The defence forces of the US, New Zealand and Australia have combined for a joint cyber warfare and incident response exercise as part of this year’s Exercise Talisman Sabre military games in Darwin.
Made up of a 10 members – four from the ADF, four from the US Marines and two from the NZDF – the cyber exercises mark the first time these three nations have conducted a joint defensive cyber operation together at Talisman Sabre.
As part of one combined response task, for example, the group worked together to respond to an incident involving a business that was experiencing performance issues, potentially due to a cyber incident.
The ultimate goal of the exercise was to improve collaboration between the three nations by bringing together different capabilities and tools.
“It was our role to figure out if something had happened, what the ‘attackers’ had done and what their intent or purpose may have been,” said Marine Rotational Force Darwin First Lieutenant and Cyber Warfare Officer Jared Haynie.
“You can find a lot by just looking at the data … (and) we use fully open source commercial tools that really allow us to work alongside our multinational partners.”
Mr Haynie said exercises such as these were important not just to the military but to the broader public as well, seeing as “everything nowadays is online”.
“Everything from our computers, mission systems, weapons systems, corporate businesses, and even the power grid, electricity, water and critical infrastructure is online,” he said.
“In the more recent year, we’re trying to take a closer look at what this could mean if this technology were to be attacked, how we would respond, what that looks like and making sure that when the time comes we’re able to keep the lights on.”
“We’re also trying to pull the threads to see what it would like for us to work together in a multinational environment.”
NZDF Leading Electronics Technician Alex Passmore said it was important that “we build this coalition with our critical defence partners, making sure that we’re all going about the process the same way”.
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Originally published as US, NZ and Australian Defence forces unite for groundbreaking cyber warfare exercise
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