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Slovakia achieves success on world's prestigious live cyber defence exercise - NATO's Locked Shields 2025

Ministry of Defence of The Slovak Republic

12.05.2025

The Slovak National Cybersecurity Team once again represented Slovakia successfully on the world's biggest and most complex cyber defence exercise (CDX) - Locked Shields 2025 (LS25) - organised on 5-9 May 2025 by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCD COE) based in Tallinn, Estonia.

Slovak cybersecurity experts teamed up with their fellow colleagues from Malta to form one of the 17 multinational Blue Teams (BT). Facing fierce competition from 41 NATO Allies and Partners worldwide, they performed to a very high standard and took an excellent 5th place overall.

The goal of LS25 CDX was to test and enhance the national cybersecurity teams' preparedness to defend national IT systems and critical national infrastructure (CNI), including defence infrastructure, through a highly realistic simulation of cyberattacks.

LS25 tests not only the participating nations' technical capabilities, but also their ability to work as teams under pressure as they execute incident response procedures as well as policy, legal, and media aspects. Participants must fend off cyberattacks, while dealing with disinformation campaigns, political pressure and infrastructure crises. This year the exercise also brought a host of new challenges related to quantum technologies (QT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Cooperation was an extremely vital factor in our success even this year. The 230-strong Slovak-Maltese team consisted of cybersecurity experts from 27 organisations from across government, military, academia, and industry. This underlines the significance of coordination and exchange of know-how between different sectors of society in protecting themselves against cyber threats.

Highlighting the cooperative effort required to build together cyber resilience, NATO CCD COE Director Mart Noorma said: "Locked Shields prepares nations to defend not only their networks but the essential services their societies depend on. As cyber threats grow more complex and the lines between peace and conflict blur, Locked Shields stands as a reminder that resilience is not built in isolation - it is forged through shared challenges, trusted cooperation, and relentless training."