120 Organisations Participate in ISIDOOR 2024: Cyber Crisis Excercise

The 2023 edition of ISIDOOR, one of the largest cyber resilience exercises in the Netherlands, recently concluded. This 3-day exercise is organised by the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) and Dutch Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), in collaboration with the Institute for Security and Crisis Management (COT) and Fox-IT. The aim of the exercise is to practice the exchange of information under crisis circumstances, enhance collaboration between governmental organisations, and exercise the national response during a large-scale cyber crisis.

ISIDOOR 2023 brought together over 120 public and private sector organisations, and more than 3,000 participants. Participants came from 12 different sectors such as drinking water, telecoms, energy, finance and transport. Ministries, security regions and police also participated in the exercise.

With the growing impact of digital threats on our systems, organisations, and society at large, our resilience to cyber-attacks lags behind. This is why it is crucial to practice possible scenarios and learn lessons from them. ISIDOOR serves as a large-scale cyber exercise. During the exercise, agreements, structures and processes from the National Crisis Plan Digital (LCP-Digital) are practised.

NCSC-NL acting director Corine Schipper–Derkse on the ISIDOOR: "ISIDOOR shows us how quickly a vulnerability in IT systems, due to chain dependencies, can lead to social disruption. Knowing who to work with in such a situation, where to get reliable information from and (being able to) react quickly is then crucial to prevent worse. That is why it is so important that we practise our crisis plans and agreements with each other."

ISIDOOR is of great importance to strenghten the Dutch response to an increasing number of cyber threats. It underscores the need for collaboration between private and public organisations to ensure a safer national digital landscape.

Source and full article: National Cyber Security Centre (in Dutch)

Photo: source NCSC