Fergie's Tech Blog

Australia Crumbles Under Cyber Storm II Attack

Liam Tung writes on ZDNet.com.au:

The 55 Australian organisations that took part in Australia's cyberwar games, Cyber Storm II [.pdf], suffered "death by a thousand cuts", according to the head of Australia's Cyber Storm II effort.

Speaking at day three of the AusCERT 2008 security conference, Steven Stroud, head of Australia's Cyber Storm effort and director of e-security exercises at the Attorney General's Department, told delegates that the incident response teams of participating organisations often became short-sighted under the simulated attacks, leading to chains of command crumbling, careless mistakes, and the loss of vital information.

"A lot of organisations wanted to exercise senior incident response (IR) boards, and to do that they had to create a crisis on the shop floor. What they found out was, that it was very hard to get people to escalate. The IR teams were putting out spot fires here and there and no one took a step back to see the whole house was on fire," he told delegates.

posted by Fergie @ 5/21/2008 12:27:00 PM