"International Experts Put Argonne's Cybersecurity Defense Software Through the Wringer at NATO's Cyber Coalition 2022"
Six teams of cyber defenders were assigned a special mission at Cyber Coalition 2022, the flagship cyberdefense event hosted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Estonia in November. Their mission was to set up computer-based systems and power grids at a fictitious military base and keep them operational during a cyberattack. Critical systems might go offline if hackers interfered with system operations or the power went out for more than 10 minutes. The mission included a few trip wires. Prior to the experiment, the teams were unaware of the scenario or networks, and all of the defending teams, operating remotely from separate countries, were cyberattacking each other at the same time. Three of the six teams had access to an Autonomous Intelligence Cyberdefense Agent (AICA) prototype built by the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, which helped them understand the attacks and the attackers. The remaining three teams did not have access to the AICA prototype. The AICA prototype developed by Argonne is an award-winning computer defense software that collects data, learns about its surroundings, and advises users on the next moves using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Commercialization Accelerator Program of the US Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate recently awarded Argonne funds to develop it further. The exercise was led by Benjamin Blakely, a cybersecurity research analyst in Argonne's Strategic Security Sciences division, and cyberspace experts from NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT). Blakely and ACT will release their findings in the following months. This article continues to discuss NATO's 2022 Cyber Coalition and its use of Argonne's cybersecurity defense software.