Cyber Storm V: After Action Report

Cyber Storm (CS), the Department's capstone national-level cyber exercise series, provides the framework for the most extensive government-sponsored cybersecurity exercises of its kind. Mandated by Congress, these exercises are part of the Department's ongoing efforts to assess and strengthen cyber preparedness and examine incident response processes. DHS uses the findings from these exercises to advance collective cyber incident response capabilities. They also strengthen information sharing partnerships among federal, state, international, and private sector partners. Players responded to a cyber-specific scenario that leveraged weaknesses in common protocols and services used on the Internet. The scenario included impacts to routing methodology, the Domain Name System (DNS) used to map hostnames to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to provide authentication and confidentiality. Scenario conditions affected a wide variety of corporate and government systems, medical devices, and payment systems.