Hong Kong Cyber Drill Strengthens Local Readiness against Targeted Attacks

With a surge in targeted attacks, Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre (HKCERT) today (8 November 2013) conducted a territory-wide drill to raise the readiness of local critical Internet infrastructure providers and mobile network operators against such attacks. Some government departments also participated in the drill to test the effectiveness of their incident handling procedures.

According to HKCERT, 871 botnet, hacking and denial-of-service attacks were reported in the first 10 months of 2013, up 40% from the same period of 2012.

Mr Leung Siu-Cheong, Senior Consultant of HKCERT, said, “As cyber attacks become more frequent and complex in nature, the need for collaborative efforts to take down malicious websites and botnets that instigate the attacks have never been greater. The drill successfully contained distributed denial-of-service and domain name hijack attacks by a fictitious hacking group which tried to paralyze major web portals to disseminate malicious messages. The drill also tested the malicious website analysing capability of the drill participants and their incident handling procedures.”

Under the theme of “Responding to Targeted Attacks”, various scenarios of cyber attacks were simulated which required immediate action by participating organizations. They included the Hong Kong Police, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, Internet service providers, mobile network operators and other key players in the Internet community

List of Participating Organizations

Exercise Control Team

• Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre
• Hong Kong Police Force, HKSAR Government
• Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, HKSAR Government
• The DotAsia Organization
• Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation

Players
Network providers:

• Hutchison Telecommunications (Hong Kong) Limited
• Hutchison Global Communications Limited
• SmarTone
• Information Technology Service Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Domain Name Registrars:

• UDomain Web Hosting Company
• Speedy Group Corporation

* Some government departments also participated in the drill.