The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) has brought together nearly 30 financial firms for a Nato live-fire cyber defence exercise.
The Locked Shields exercise will take place over several days, putting the participants throughs a complex and cascading set of cyber attacks on a fictional country, with impacts ranging from military and government to critical infrastructure such as energy, telecommunications, shipping, and financial services.
FS-ISAC, a not-for-profit member organisation, has designed the financial sector scenario, which simulates real life payments system outages by a central bank and the impacts on the financial system.
The scenario, says FS-ISAC, is based on similar but far less severe outages experienced over the last several years at major central banks around the world.
Participants include Barclays, CME Group and Mastercard.
Steven Silberstein, CEO, FS-ISAC, says: “Our participation will allow us to crowdsource exercise responses from our global membership to assess and mitigate threats as the scenario unfolds, building the muscle memory our members and the overarching sector can rely on when faced with real-time cyber warfare.”