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More than 200 organisations and 400 cybersecurity professionals from 29 European countries are testing their readiness to counter cyber attacks in a day-long simulation, organised by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

During Cyber Europe 2014, experts from the public and private sectors, including cyber security agencies, national computer emergency response teams, telecoms companies, financial institutions and internet service providers are testing their procedures and capabilities against in a lifelike, large scale cybersecurity scenario.

Cyber Europe 2014 is the largest and most complex such exercise organised in Europe. More than 2,000 separate cyber incidents will be dealt with, including denial of service attacks to online services, intelligence and media reports on cyber attack operations, website defacements (attacks that change a website’s appearance), exfiltration of sensitive information, attacks on critical infrastructure such as energy or telecoms networks and the testing of EU co-operation and escalation procedures. This is a distributed exercise, involving several exercise centres across Europe, which is co-ordinated by a central exercise control centre.

European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, whose remit includes the Digital Agenda, said: “The sophistication and volume of cyber attacks are increasing every day. They cannot be countered if individual states work alone or just a handful of them act together. I’m pleased that EU and EFTA member states are working with the EU institutions with ENISA bringing them together. Only this kind of common effort will help keep today’s economy and society protected.”

The exercise will test procedures to share operational information on cyber crises in Europe, enhance national capabilities to tackle these crises and explore the effect of multiple and parallel information exchanges. The exercise also tests out the EU-Standard Operational Procedures – a set of guidelines to share operational information on cyber crisis.