Senior Ministers of State for Defence and Communications explore advancements in inter-agency collaboration at CIDeX 2023, a cyber defence exercise featuring 200 participants.
Senior Minister of State for Defence, Mr Heng Chee How, and Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information and Health, Dr Janil Puthucheary, visited the Critical Infrastructure Defence Exercise (CIDeX) 2023 at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. The event, organized by the Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), ran from 22 to 24 November, with support from iTrust/SUTD and the National Cybersecurity R&D Laboratory (NCL).
CIDeX focuses on enhancing Whole-Of-Government (WoG) cyber capabilities to detect and tackle security threats to Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) networks controlling critical infrastructure. The exercise involved over 200 participants from DIS, CSA, and 24 other national agencies across six Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) sectors.
Participants operated on six OT testbeds across power, water, telecom, and aviation sectors, engaging in simulated cyber-attacks. Blue Teams, consisting of national agency participants, defended digital infrastructure against live simulated cyber-attacks by a composite Red Team. The exercise aimed to sharpen participants’ instincts and technical competencies, fostering knowledge-sharing across agencies.
Before CIDeX, participants underwent a five-day hands-on training program at the Singapore Armed Forces Cyber Defence Test and Evaluation Centre (CyTEC) at Stagmont Camp.
On the sidelines of CIDeX 2023, the DIS signed MoUs for cyber collaboration with Ensign InfoSecurity, Google, and ST Engineering, expanding its technology sector partnerships.
Source – MINDEF
