Status Report 2022: The DECIDE Platform Remains the Definitive Cyber Exercise Platform

It was a productive 2022 for the DECIDE^® cyber security exercise team. Events in the world of cyber and information security continued to emerge at unprecedented levels highlighting the importance of NUARI’s mission and the role that our cyber security exercises can play in securing our nation’s critical infrastructure.

Using the DECIDE^® Platform, NUARI and its partners executed distributed decision-making events with organizations of all sizes, with participants worldwide.

The exercises tested incident response plans and decision-making capabilities, resulting in after-action reports aimed at improving strategic communication, compliance, risk, public relations, and overall resilience within the participating organizations.

During 2022, the cyber security exercise team completed 41 exercises which included 15 exercises with organizations operating in the energy sector and 13 organizations operating in the transportation sector. (Read more about NUARI’s work with the Transportation and Energy Sectors).

“We are grateful to have the DECIDE^® Platform and the ability to work with organizations on their cyber resiliency as fluid work environments have become the new normal. The distributed nature of our exercises has allowed us to continue to fulfill our mission of supporting national security through the development of organizational preparedness and resilience against exponentially increasing cyber threats.”

                                   -Kristen Pedersen, Vice President of Cyber Operations

These exercises strengthened situational awareness, strategic communications capabilities, and digital response playbooks to prevail against cyber threats we continue to see affecting our country.

Our interactions with exercising organizations have allowed NUARI the time and flexibility to really explore “when YOUR problem becomes OUR problem,” engaging with organizations, communities, and states to explore our shared roles in building a more secure and resilient nation.

The results?

-              Leadership and vision matter

-              Larger organizations have the advantage of maturity and scale

-              Smaller organizations have the advantage of flexibility and agility

-              Exercises are a cheap way to “break it before it’s broken.”

                                         -Tom Muehleisen, NUARI’s Director of Exercises

NUARI’s outreach team continues to raise awareness of the importance of conducting resiliency exercises. There are five additional exercises scheduled for transportation in early 2023 and 3 additional exercises in early 2023 for organizations in the energy sector.

For a deeper dive into our work, NUARI has published two white papers highlighting resiliency exercises for the financial and energy sectors.

Our Exercise Planning team leverages deep subject matter expertise and wide-ranging professional experience, along with the unrivaled versatility of the DECIDE^® Platform, to achieve meaningful results. We are proud of what our team accomplished with our exercise partners and the tenacity they demonstrated during these challenging times.

We want to thank all the organizations that participated in cybersecurity exercises with us this year. It takes all our efforts to bolster the security of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

NUARI has been a global leader for over a decade in developing cyber war gaming, distributed learning technology, distributed simulation technology, critical infrastructure exercises, and cybersecurity curriculum. An essential component of NUARI is the DECIDE^® Exercise Platform.

Exercises incorporating the DECIDE^® Platform simulate cyber-attacks for critical infrastructure organizations and their partners to stress and test incident response plans and decision-making capabilities, resulting in after-action reports to improve strategic communication, compliance, risk, public relations, and overall resilience. NUARI executes these distributed command and control decision-making exercises with organizations of all sizes, in one geographic location or spread across the country, from just a few players to hundreds of participants in a multi-agency exercise. As shifts to remote work environments continue to develop, the distributed exercise environment of our DECIDE^® Platform allows for uninterrupted training for our partners.