ACCSA

Austrian Cyber Crisis Support Activities

ACCSA aimed to enable comprehensive and innovative training, exercise and evaluation concepts for all actors in state cyber crisis management (CKM) and the like and thereby reduced response times and error rates in the event of a real cyber crisis.

As the number of complex cyber attacks (e.g., ransomware, phishing, DDoS, CEO fraud) has increased rapidly in recent years, it has become more challenging for companies and government agencies to adequately prepare for these incidents and to practice and test cyber crisis management processes. Therefore, the ACCSA research project addressed the question of how novel approaches to training and exercising such processes can be developed and applied. The goal was to significantly increase preparedness for government cyber crises among all stakeholders and significantly reduce response time and failure rates.

In ACCSA, an integral training and exercise concept was created for all cyber crisis management actors and exercise scenarios and courses of action were developed using exploratory scenario analysis. The concepts are intended to train cross-level communication (technical, management, first responder, political) between actors as well as spanning cooperation between government and industry to manage cyber crises using dynamic nonlinear exercise sequences. This was supported by the implementation of a cyber crisis management toolbox incorporating results of past KIRAS projects specifically for exercise preparation and evaluation.

For the first time, it is now possible to check the level of training and preparation of organizations for large-scale cyber incidents on the basis of objectifiable measurement criteria, thus making the task of auditing critical organizations much easier, especially for NIS authorities. The concepts developed were evaluated in several workshops and extensively tested in a large-scale virtual simulation.

SBA Research was working on threat scenarios which are used as basis for the training concept for the national cyber crisis management.  We defined the structure of the curriculum and training paths. As defined in the training concept SBA Research delivered two technical trainings.

Further Information

• ACCSA is led by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology.
• KIRAS Project Website