Cyber ShockWave: Simulated Cyber-Attack on the U.S. Government being conducted in Washington, D.C.

In recent months, there have been a number of cyber-attacks on numerous governments and companies’ critical information systems, with the most recent being the alleged cyber-attack by China on Google’s network.  This seems to have led to some serious concerns by the U.S. government and others with a need to obtain suitable preparedness to possible future attacks.

So today, on February 16 there will be a simulated exercise of a cyber-attack on the United States Government at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C.  The exercise titled “Cyber ShockWave” is being held by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) , a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that develops multiparty solutions in public policy.  The goal of the exercise will be to see how well members of government would respond to a large-scale cyber-attack on the nation's information systems.

The participants are a group of former national security and administration officials from both major parties which includes, Michael Chertoff, former secretary of U.S. Homeland Security, John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, former Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin and Fran Townsend, former White House homeland security adviser.  The participants of the exercise have no knowledge of that will occur or what to expect until it happens and it has been stated the scenarios were written by Hollywood screenwriters with help from cyber security experts.

Members of the press including CNN have been invited to view and record the exercise live.  The results of the simulated attack will be broadcast on CNN as a special program the weekend of February 20.

SecurityOrb.com stated in their blog, “The federal government has staged fake cyber-attacks before and many organizations do so as part of their incident response preparedness.  In fact, Booz Allen Hamilton ran a cyber warfare simulation in 2008, with representatives from both the government and private sector”.  The blog further stated,” The results should provide real world viable information about how to handle an actual event and some usable lessons to aid in future policy and defense of a real attack”.

Cyber ShockWave is being funded by General Dynamics, Georgetown University, SMobile Systems, Southern Company and PayPal.