Japanese Cybersecurity Training

Project Summary

A team of researchers, headed by ISTS, traveled to Japan in February and March 2005, to conduct training seminars for the Japanese government's National Incident Response Team and hosted NIRT officials on their visit to West Point's annual Cyber Defense Exercise. NIRT is a sub-agency of Japan's Cabinet Secretariat, an organization similar to the Executive Office of the White House in the U.S. NIRT is responsible for protecting the civilian computer networks from attack and intrusion, primarily at the Cabinet level of the Japanese government. ISTS's Cyber Security Exercise Development Center, headed by Bill Brown, collaborated with Rob Hoffman and Julio Rodriguez of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Andy Cutts, Director of the Cyber Conflict Research Program at the National Center for the Study of Counter-Terrorism and Cybercrime at Norwich University. The collaboration, spanning two months, included presentations about honeypots, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) security, cyber exercises, and cyber security strategies. The team assisted cabinet ministers and top information technology managers within the Japanese government to prepare their national plan for cyber incident response, including developing a project plan for developing a large scale cyber exercise. With permission from the U.S. Department of Defense, the NIRT officials, sponsored by ISTS, observed the annual Cyber Defense Exercise sponsored by the NSA at West Point in April. ISTS is grateful to U.S. federal officials for authorizing our participation.