A detailed look at NATO's Locked Shields, the largest cyber defense exercise in the world
Berylia is under attack. Again. — The island nation, located somewhere in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean, relies on its state-of-the-art drone industry for a large part of its income.
Context & Ripple Effects
Locked Shields arrives against a real backdrop: reporting tied the Polish stock exchange and German steel plant intrusions to a growing hacking campaign aimed at the US and NATO campaign against US and NATO targets. The exercise answers that with a simulated nation — Berylia, whose economy hinges on its drone industry — as the attack surface.
The format proved durable: by the following year the wargames had grown to 19 teams defending national infrastructure, and NATO later extended scenarios to widespread cyberattacks on financial infrastructure. This 2016 piece is the early snapshot of an exercise scaling from technical drill to full-spectrum rehearsal.
First-order effects
- Blue teams in the exercise must defend Berylia's critical systems in real time, with the drone industry — the nation's main income source — as a named target of the simulated offensive.
Second-order effects
- NATO's member and partner nations face pressure to field trained defenders annually, feeding a talent pipeline that parallel programs like the UK's Cyber Security Challenge already monetize for corporate hiring.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the exercise keeps absorbing new sectors — national infrastructure first, then finance — turning an annual drill into the de facto rehearsal space for how allied governments and industries coordinate during a real cyber campaign.
The trend: State-run cyber defense exercises are expanding from narrow technical contests into whole-of-economy rehearsals, with NATO's Locked Shields setting the template other governments and industries copy.