International Cyber Defence Surge: CERT.LV leads a Month-Long Operation in collaboration with Allied Forces
CERT.LV has just concluded a month-long surge in collaboration with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), and the Latvian National Armed Forces (LNAF) to augment and further strengthen the ongoing threat hunt operations aimed at defending the networks, systems and digital services of significant importance to Latvia.
Various allied nations had the opportunity to visit the surge to learn from the successful cyber-defense relationship between Latvia and Canada, and potentially replicate our collaborative operations and threat hunting TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures)) in their respective areas of responsibility.
During hunt activities for the surge, analysts had found numerous cyber threats such as, bad practices, malicious, and suspicious activities that can be technically attributed to financially-motivated as well as nation state-sponsored cyber threat actors. Work on preparing reports on the findings is ongoing. Target infrastructure holders are receiving support on eliminating deficiencies.
Although multiple findings were discovered, several elements of good practice were noted and the target infrastructure holders showed great maturity and responsibility, working together with the threat hunters to eliminate deficiencies and harden their infrastructures.
Analysis of these activities had increased our understanding of adversarial TTPs. Information of these activities were also shared real time between allied nations to improve the overall NATO collective cyber resilience and effectively deter cyber threat actors by making their offensive cyber operations less effective, more expensive and detected as soon as possible.
The surge had also received several high-level official visits from Canada, which included the Canadian Ambassador to NATO, Mr. D. Angell, the Canadian NATO defense attaché VAdm S.E.G. Bishop, the Canadian Cyber Forces Commander RAdm Carosielli, and Commander of Task Force Latvia Col. V.G. Kirstein. These further attested to the strategic importance of the collaborative efforts between Latvia and Canada.
