CISA Hosts Seventh Cyber Storm Exercise with Government, Industry and International Partners

WASHINGTON – The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was joined this week by government, industry and international partners for Cyber Storm VII, a national cyber exercise designed to simulate response to a cyber crisis impacting the nation’s critical infrastructure. The exercise assesses cybersecurity preparedness and examines incident response processes, procedures, and information sharing. It provides a venue for players to simulate the discovery of and response to a widespread coordinated cyberattack without the consequences of a real-world event. With approximately 2,000 participants over the course of three days, Cyber Storm is the nation’s most extensive cybersecurity exercise series.

“We’re more connected than ever, which means our nation’s critical infrastructure faces increased risks from cyber-attacks,” said CISA Assistant Director for Infrastructure Security Brian Harrell. “No one company or government agency can be expected to go it alone, which is why exercises like Cyber Storm bring everyone together to discuss and exercise how we would respond collectively to a cyber-attack. Each Cyber Storm our coordination and capabilities get better, and this year was no different.”

Cyber Storm provides a unique venue where aspects of the nation’s critical infrastructure – federal, state, and local entities, along with the private sector owner and operators –examine collective cyber incident response capabilities with the goal of identifying areas for growth and improvement. Each Cyber Storm exercise builds on the conclusions of the previous one and is used to evaluate progress made in the cyber response community. Cyber Storm began in 2006 and has taken place every two years since.

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