The Brazilian Army’s (EB) Cyber Defense Command (ComDCiber) held the First Ordinary Session of the VI Ibero-American Cyber Defense Forum in early October, in Brasilia. The event was held in parallel to Exercise Cyber Guardian 5.0, considered one of the main cyber defense simulations in the Southern Hemisphere.
Thirteen countries attended the Ibero-American Cyber Defense Forum: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and Uruguay.
“[The Forum] takes place so that these countries can replicate the activities [of Cyber Guardian 5.0] in their respective defense sectors,” Rear Admiral Marco Antônio Linhares Soares, head of ComDCiber’s Strategic Management Center, said, Brazilian defense news site Defesanet reported.
According to the EB, the forum seeks to promote cooperation and integration in the cyber defense sector of Ibero-American countries, providing mutual knowledge in areas such as cyber doctrine and capabilities. “In this edition, in addition to the regular session, forum members visited Exercise Cyber Guardian 5.0. Instructions were given so that the member countries could get a closer look at how the exercise is planned and coordinated,” the EB said via LinkedIn.
Among the topics discussed were the imminent launch of a Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) for forum members, training exchanges among countries, and the setting of a remote help mechanism in the event of incidents, the Spanish government said in a statement.
Exercise Cyber Guardian 5.0
The Cyber Guardian activities took place simultaneously at the Higher Defense School in Brasilia and at the Army Second Division Command in São Paulo. Participants trained in cyber security activities involving a country’s infrastructures: water, energy, transport, communications, finance, biosecurity, defense, and the nuclear sector, the EB said.
“During the five days of Cyber Guardian, more than 100 organizations [including national and international agencies and companies] and around 500 people attended the event,” the Brazilian Navy News Agency told Diálogo. “The focus was on drilling preventive and reactive measures in the face of cyber incident scenarios with the potential of causing adverse effects on strategic structures, requiring unity of effort with interagency responses.”
Cyber defense
For Army General Achilles Furlan Neto, head of EB’s Science and Technology Department, cyber defense is something that cannot be done in isolation. “It has to involve all the critical sectors of a nation. Energy, the financial sector, the nuclear sector… everything can be the target of a cyberattack,” said Gen. Furlan. “In an exercise like this, the aim is to train the officers who are going to carry out these attacks, to prepare them for the scenarios they may face.”
During the simulations, a Crisis Office, in charge of a team from the Brazilian government, was set up. Participating teams made up of public and private agencies and companies, as well as academic bodies and institutions, presented solutions to the challenges encountered throughout the activities.
“The big gain we get from this exercise is that the regulatory agencies in each sector, along with the participating companies, practice their contingency plans within the simulated cyber problem,” EB Lieutenant General Alan Denilson Lima Costa, Cyber Defense commander, said in a Ministry of Defense statement.
“We worked out how each organization would react to the problem, in order to keep their services running, without harming society as a whole, because, after all, they are the providers of essential services for the Brazilian population,” Lt. Gen. Lima Costa said.
One of the participating companies was Atech, part of the Embraer Group. “The company is bringing its Air Defense System [SDA] to Cyber Guardian, a solution that simulates airspace monitoring, recreating an environment with military characteristics, where vulnerabilities are inserted to be exploited by attackers (Red Team) and mitigated by defenders (Blue Team),” news site Defesa Aérea & Naval reported.
Air crash
One of the simulations in Brasilia included the crisis management required following a plane crash. “Aviation itself is very sensitive to cyberthreats. We are training so that, when something real happens, we already know what actions should be taken, what to activate, which partners could help us,” Werllen Andrade, technical manager for Cyber Security and Air Transport Facilitation at the National Civil Aviation Agency of Brazil, said in a statement. “And this makes the response that much faster and more effective,” Andrade concluded.