In an evermore fraught world, an exercise at the St. Clair College Centre for the Arts aimed to answer one key question: what happens if the border goes dark? On Tuesday, cybersecurity event company, siberX, brought its Operation: Defend the North series to Windsor for a tabletop exercise to simulate a cyberattack on the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel. “It’s a certain balancing act between following the process, following the playbook,” said Tal Czudner, the CEO of the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel Corporation. Czudner was among those on the panel, working through the public relations and information aspect of the mock crisis. “I need to trust people to give me the right information,” he said. “Ideally I’ve got a little bit of trust in the community.” The tabletop exercise is toured across the country, with each city getting its own scenario to manage cyberattacks and digital security, to manage the pitfalls of responding crisis as technology continues to advance. “On the face of it people might say, ‘Okay, we’ll just shift to manual processing,’” said Ali Hirji, chair of the exercise series. “But it’s not that simple.” Hirji says the technical response is important, but business continuity plans can’t be overlooked. “There are other things that might happen and if delays happen on this end, the whole supply chain might get impacted,” he said. Defend the North The exercise moved through five stages: detecting an incident, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. “You see how chaotic a cyber event can be and even if you have the best laid plans and you think you’re prepared, I don’t know if you are,” said Amar Singh, Chief Information Security Officer for St. Clair College. Hirji says companies should be practising their plan on a timeline, preferably once a month or at least three times a year. Czudner adds flexibility matters too. “It’s important that every organization has a playbook and they follow that script, but they also have to be able to pivot because you never know what’s going to be thrown your way,” he said. Hirji says today’s exercise can help expose gaps — and they aren’t always technical. “A gap could be that somebody under stress or an executive under stress completely breaks down,” said Hirji. “Is that the person you want to have in your incident command room? Those are the kind of questions events like this bring out.” High school hackathon A high school hackathon was also held in conjunction with the event with students from Catholic Central and Holy Names high schools in Windsor and North Star high school in Amherstburg participating. Their exercise involved determining where a hack to the school system originated, who did it, and how to prevent future attacks. “This aligns well with what we’ve been doing over the last year-and-a-half as we strive to improve our incident response planning and our business continuity planning,” said John Ulicny, the Director of Education for the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board. “We’re looking at it from a variety of different angles, not only the potential for cyberattacks, but other attacks that might take down the internet for an extended period of time.” The exercise was an eye-opener for students like Lucien Gaudreault of North Star. “It does give me a better idea of how that kind of stuff happened,” said Gaudreault. “It’s interesting to see and think about.”
