WELCOME TO ALLIED COMMAND TRANSFORMATION

NATO's Strategic Warfare Development Command

Exercise Crossed Swords Tests Allied Cyber Operations

December 12, 2023

The Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, located in Tallinn, Estonia, is integral to innovating Alliance capabilities in the ever-growing cyber domain. The Centre is the largest Centre of Excellence – sponsored by every member of the Alliance and receives contributions from an additional eight Partner Nations, including new members Iceland, Japan, Ireland and Ukraine. Its persistent effort to conduct active exercises that expose vulnerabilities and provide a depth of lessons learned push forward the Alliance’s ability to educate and train its personnel on cyber-related initiatives. These efforts in turn contribute to the readiness of forces and resiliency of systems across the Alliance’s ecosystem in an important domain of operations.

The Centre hosts two annual exercises: Crossed Swords and Locked Shields. These exercises are interactive, real-world simulations that allow the Alliance’s cyber security subject matter experts to enhance their skills in defending the Alliance’s critical infrastructure.  The Locked Shields exercise, which occurred in April 2023, included 38 countries, 5500 participating systems, and over 30 international organizations, industries and academic partners. This exercise sought to test defensive cyber operations and digital forensics while also fostering multi-national coordination.

The Crossed Swords exercise picks up where Locked Shields left off and focuses on offensive cyber operations that integrate with kinetic operations. This exercise includes participants from more than 20 countries, including NATO and non-NATO member states, and 400 systems.

Crossed Swords is an annual technical red teaming cyber exercise training penetration testers, digital forensics experts and situational awareness experts. Over the years Crossed Swords has evolved from a relatively straightforward technical training workshop to an exercise that also involves leadership training for the command element, legal aspects and joint cyber-kinetic operations. The exercise also provides a training opportunity for the members of Red Team playing the adversary in the Locked Shields cyber defence exercise.

The 2023 iteration of Crossed Swords is designed to train the cyber specialists to successfully conduct full-spectrum offensive cyber operations. The goal is to practice and experiment in a field that is highly relevant in today’s world. Crossed Swords is unique in that it is a series of exercises meant exclusively to train national red teamers and cyber command specialists on how to conduct a range of offensive cyber operations. The training audience includes cyber operators but also digital forensic experts and command level specialist; the scenario of the exercise takes place in a fictional setting in which a friendly nation state is in dispute with a hostile state, and reflects a non-Article 5 situation developing in the cyber domain. The exercise benefits considerably from having academia and industry partners developing the exercise, in order to make the endeavour authentic and similar to real world challenges.

The main objective of the exercise is to plan and conduct a computer-assisted tactical and technical operation, covering a complete sequence of cyber-attacks through Offensive Cyber Operations teams, whilst integrating digital forensic capabilities to conduct cyber operations. The exercise brings together Allies and Partners to provide an offensive cyber operations training opportunity, while enhancing mutual knowledge and partnerships through exercising tactical and technical level coordination during the execution of a cyber-mission.