Bittium’s secure Bittium Tough Mobile smartphone was part of the Locked Shields 2018 cyber defense exercise organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), held in Tallinn, Estonia on 23-27 April 2018. It was the world’s largest and most complex international live-fire cyber defense exercise where more than 1,000 experts from 30 nations participated in total.

The annual exercise is a unique opportunity for national representatives of cyber defense to practice protection of national information technology systems and critical infrastructure under the intense pressure of a severe cyber attack. It is a Red Team vs. Blue Team exercise, where the latter are formed by member nations of CCDCOE. The participating Blue Teams play the role of national rapid reaction teams that are deployed to assist a fictional country in handling a large-scale cyber incident and all its multiple implications. During the exercise, the secure Bittium Tough Mobile smartphone enabled communication and the use of an authority PTT (Push-To-Talk) application among the members of the defending Blue Teams. The mission of the Blue Team was to protect and defend the modeled information technology system from cyber attacks.

"Locked Shields exercise enables to practice solving cyber incidents in the most complex and intense playground possible. To build resilience against cyber attacks against our critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications or power supply, we need to understand both the technical and strategic challenges that entails," said Merle Maigre, director of the NATO-accredited cyber defence hub. "Locked Shields underlines the need for interdisciplinary approach in cyber defence solutions," adds Maigre.

Locked Shields 2018 was organised by NATO CCDCOE in cooperation with the Finnish Defence Forces, the Estonian Defence Forces, the Swedish Defence University, the British Joint Army, the United States European Command, National Security Research Institute of the Republic of Korea and Tallinn University of Technology.

Bittium Tough Mobile

Bittium Tough Mobile is a secure and strong Android-based LTE smartphone combining the latest information security and commercial device technologies. Bittium Tough Mobile incorporates a hardware-based security platform, which enables strong device security as well as deep integration of both customers’ own and third party software security solutions. Bittium Tough Mobile and related Bittium Secure Suite back-end system is the first smartphone based solution in the world to have receive official Confidential level encryption product classification.

More information about Bittium Tough Mobile: https://www.bittium.com/BittiumToughMobile