PHILIPPINES -- When considering conflicts in the modern era, it’s essential that U.S. and allied nations understand the importance of the cyber battlefield. The men and women participating in the Cyber Defense Exercise completed their first iteration of joint training between U.S. and Philippine service members. The cyber defense exercise is a component of exercise Balikatan 2023, which seeks to maintain and straighten the relationship between the allied nations.
During the exercise, three groups simulated defending and attacking networks while exploiting each other’s operating procedures to catch inconsistencies that highlighted malicious activity. Through this, the goal was to modernize the U.S. Philippine Defense Alliance and improve collective capabilities and interoperability.
From the beginning of the exercise, the joint force separated into three different teams. Each had a different objective, and they actively worked against each other in a collection of cyber defenses, attacks, and observations.
1st Lt. Hannah Couto, a cyber operations officer from I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, described the most important factor for herself was to understand and connect with members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and their standard operating procedures. As a member of the white team, she administered the blue team in their defense so they understood the reasons for their network performance against the red team.
“One of the biggest challenges that you have to overcome is to figure out how are we going to take all our individual SOPs and match them in a way that is going to become effective for whatever our goal is for the exercise,” said Couto.
Couto also said that she was focused on “Building relationships with her allied partners while overcoming language barriers and meshing their different SOPs in order to create a more efficient fighting force.
Throughout the exercise, the read team was finding ways to exploit the defensive cyber capabilities of their counterparts by attacking the blue team’s domain controllers to find the websites’ back doors. Maj. Demetrio C. Reyes with the Armed Forces of the Philippines was the executive officer of the cyber mission unit, and he observed over the red team. Demetrio understands the advantages of being aware of cyber attacks.
“All of our infrastructure is in the digital world,” said Demetrio. “We are using most of our time on the computer, and we don’t even know what they [malicious accounts] are doing on our network and how well it’s working on our infrastructure.”
Through working with American allies, Demetrio says the exercise will enhance joint capabilities in cyberspace through continued activities for following iterations. Demetrio said his team learned a lot through exercise scenarios while working together.
Protecting national secrets and private information was a priority to maintain throughout the exercise. The blue team was in charge of maintaining servers throughout the exercise scenario. They fought against cyber attacks and fraudulent domain controllers who attempted to impersonate one of their own users. National guard Sgt Arvi Quioc was a blue team participant and had been looking forward to participating in Balikatan 23 and returning to his home country. He explained some of the ways that the blue team was able to monitor attacks.
“We start seeing their network traffic,” said Quioc. “We start seeing their IP address getting into our destination source. So, once we start seeing that in our base, we know that they’re trying to get into our systems.”
Quioc’s team was not initially able to understand every malicious attack as it became present but waited until they acted in order to identify their objective or reason for breaching their servers to respond accordingly.
This year's 38th iteration of Balikatan concludes another successful year of commitment amongst the Filipino citizens and U.S. allies. The U.S. and Philippines will consciously maintain contact for operations and continued planning for future exercises.