Virginia Guard tests cyberattack scenarios at Cyber Fortress 26

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - The Virginia Army National Guard’s 91st Cyber Brigade hosted Cyber Fortress 26, a joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational exercise, July 25 - Aug. 8 at the State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach.

“This was the best iteration of Cyber Fortress yet,” said Col. Gerald Mazur, commander of the Fort Belvoir-based 91st Cyber Brigade.

Cyber Fortress consists of two lines of effort, he explained. The first is the recertification of two cyber protection teams and validation of one battalion headquarters.

This year, the South Carolina National Guard’s 125th Cyber Protection Battalion was validated, while the California National Guard’s Cyber Protection Team 171 and the Ohio National Guard’s Cyber Protection Team 172 were recertified.

“The 91st Cyber Brigade is the only deployable, cyberspace operations capability in the United States Army,” Mazur explained. The brigade’s footprint spans 31 states, including battalion headquarters in Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts and Indiana.

The second line of effort was a domestic operations exercise that brought together active-duty, Reserve and National Guard components of the U.S. military, NATO partners, local, state and federal government agencies, and civilian partners from private industry to respond to a simulated real-world cyber incident. This year’s scenario focused on hydroelectricity.

“This year we conducted the range using the Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which proved to be a very reliable platform,” said Col. David Garner, commander of the 91st Cyber Brigade’s Fairfax-based Information Operations Support Center and the exercise director. “Moreover, the support from the PCTE team from concept design to range execution was nothing less than outstanding.”

Participants included the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Virginia State Police, Virginia Defense Force, Virginia Fusion Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Air National Guard, U.S. Army Reserve and U.S. Marine Corps, as well as military cyber personnel from Finland and Estonia.

This was the fifth iteration of Cyber Fortress, and this year the 91st Cyber Brigade leaders made it a priority to work closely with their partners at CISA, Garner explained.

“CISA developed and facilitated a cyber incident response table top exercise that involved multiple state and federal partners, provided members to the red team and white cell, and worked closely with the 91st Cyber Brigade intelligence section and the Virginia Fusion Center to develop injects that added value and realism to the exercise,” he explained.

The first week focused on cyber defense of operational technology, which is used to interact with physical devices such as industrial control systems and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems. Soldiers and civilian partners also received training in cyber threat intelligence, malware analysis and electrical systems.

Another key event during the first week was Distinguished Visitors Day, which included capability briefings, a tabletop exercise and air movement of cyber operators aboard helicopters from the Virginia National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 224th Aviation Regiment.

The second week featured a force-on-force cyber exercise designed to simulate and test responses to a cyberattack. Working collaboratively, participants conducted incident response, threat analysis and defensive cyber operations as integrated Blue teams, countering a dedicated Red team that emulated multiple threat actors within a realistic critical infrastructure enterprise network environment.

“Overall, I am very pleased with how the entire staff and our partners worked together to present a fantastic training environment for the participants,” Garner said.

Cyber Fortress is one of the nation’s premier military exercises focused on a whole-of-government response to significant cyber threats affecting critical infrastructure and key resources. It is the only Army National Guard cyberspace operations exercise that includes capability certification or recertification.