Inside NATO's Locked Shields cybersecurity war games, where 19 teams practice defending national infrastructure from cyberattacks
Steve Ranger / TechRepublic :
Context & Ripple Effects
TechRepublic has tracked Locked Shields, the world's largest cyber defense exercise, since its earlier deep dives in 2016, and this piece goes inside the edition where 19 blue teams defend simulated national infrastructure against live red-team attacks. The exercise matters because it is the rehearsal space NATO uses to test how allied governments would actually respond to a coordinated attack on power grids, networks and critical services.
The arc is expanding: by 2021 the wargames had grown to include scenarios probing widespread attacks on financial infrastructure, and adjacent sectors such as the nuclear industry have adopted similar hands-on training laboratories, making Locked Shields the template for a broader preparedness culture.
First-order effects
- The 19 participating national teams get a live-fire readout of their defensive gaps against realistic attack tooling, and NATO gets a comparative picture of which members' cyber defenses hold up under pressure.
Second-order effects
- Sector operators outside government — the nuclear energy industry among them — respond by building their own hands-on training labs modeled on the exercise format, and recruitment pipelines like the UK's Cyber Security Challenge feed both companies and state teams with tested talent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual multinational exercises become the de facto standard for critical-infrastructure defense, shifting cybersecurity from a per-organization compliance task to a coalition-level capability that is measured, ranked and rehearsed between allies.
The trend: National cyber defense is consolidating around large-scale recurring coalition exercises like Locked Shields, which increasingly set the playbook and talent pipeline for protecting critical infrastructure across allied governments and industries.