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Commenting on the news, Richard Cassidy, Technical Director EMEA at Alert Logic said:

“Activities such as these “War Games” serve a great purpose in raising industry awareness about the real threat posed to businesses across the industry. Focusing on finance and national infrastructure sector is a good start and represents the most high-profile high-value targets we’ve seen attacked over the past several years. Having the best government led minds from both sides of the pond working together to test the threat protection capabilities of some of our most important organisations, is a great benefit given that the source is not malicious and any weaknesses found can be rectified to bolster their respective security mechanisms.

Success will be deemed by how the information is shared and the lessons learned by both sides on the outcome of these games. The goal has to ensure better security posture of the targets and raised awareness across the industry of the real danger organisations face into todays light-speed evolving threat landscape. Hacker cells are becoming far more sophisticated in response to the increased capabilities of our applications and infrastructure and as such taking a great deal more time and effort in targeting their victims of high value.

As with all best security practices; we need to constantly assess and assure our environments against the latest threats and compliance mandates. The war games are great start, but without repeated activity (not just by government led bodies, but by businesses themselves), it can be case of “baton-down-the-hatches” for the storm and focus moved elsewhere until the next event; which would be missing the point entirely by the teams entrusted with the security of some of our respective nations most prized organisations and institutions.”