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LINCOLN, Neb. – “You are the frontlines of this new data war.” That’s how Maj. Gen. Craig Strong, Nebraska National Guard adjutant general, addressed military, public and private industry cyber protection specialists, June 12, during the two-week “Cyber Tatanka” exercise on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “The defense of the homeland, [our] critical infrastructure and the American way of life is dependent upon the skills and abilities of those in this room,” Strong said. “Here is where our readiness and our resiliency are being built.” Cyber Tatanka is a unique two-week cyber exercise designed to assist military, public infrastructure and private industry cyber defense specialists in developing skills and response capabilities to identify and defeat intrusions into their information networks. The exercise took place in Kiewit Hall – a newly-opened five-story computer engineering facility in the center of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. According to Ryan Carlson, a retired Nebraska Army National Guard major who helped develop the exercise with several leaders of Nebraska public infrastructure organizations, the annual exercise was designed to give cyber defense specialists an opportunity to learn more about current network protection efforts and collaborate with fellow computer and network defense specialists, while also testing their organization’s cyber response plans in a safe yet realistic virtual environment.
Protecting a critical resource Carlson said the genesis of Cyber Tatanka goes back to 2019 when he and representatives from Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) and Lincoln Electric System (LES) attended Cyber Flag. Ryan was serving as a Nebraska National Guard cyber defense team chief in Lincoln at the time. Accompanying Carlson were senior representatives of the Nebraska Public Power District and Lincoln Electric System. “You had to have a secret clearance to get through the door,” said Carlson about U.S. Cyber Command’s flagship cyber defense exercise. “[Department of Energy] only allows five clearances per organization and those usually sit with senior officials.” Following the exercise, Carlson and the two representatives discussed their impressions of the training over dinner. The representatives both agreed that the training “was great for us to see, but we know that our staff would get a lot more out of it if they could participate.” “The problem is, they can’t get a secret clearance… they can’t participate in it,” Carlson said. “So, we thought to ourselves… can we take a military training model and put it into a class environment that was completely unclassified and in a non-dot-mil environment?” That is how Cyber Tatanka was born – an exercise that would fill a very important need across Nebraska and the region – by taking an exercise based on military training models and adapting it so that it could be held in an unclassified, civilian domain. “This is about protecting Nebraskans,” Ryan said. “It’s all about protecting the critical infrastructure, which protects the citizens. It doesn’t matter what kind of organization you’re in, be it critical infrastructure, military or government… cyber is cyber is cyber.” “Cyber defensive concepts are the same,” he added. “The attack methodologies really don’t change from industry to industry.” The importance of protecting a significant piece of Nebraska’s critical infrastructure is echoed in the very name of the exercise. Tatanka is an ancient word used by members of the Lakota tribes to describe the bison that ranged across a seven-state region of the central and northern American Great Plains. “The indigenous people relied on the bison for their way of life. It was their food. It was their shelter. It was their clothing. It was their tools…” Carlson said. “It was something they greatly respected, and it was something they realized they needed to protect to support their way of life.” “We see interconnected systems as kind of that same thing,” he added. “Interconnected systems are extremely important to maintaining our way of life. And they are something that we must protect.”
Exercise continues to grow, evolve Since beginning five years ago, Cyber Tatanka has grown substantially. This year 211 specialists participated in the exercise. They represented 14 civilian organizations; six academic institutions; four federal, state and county entities; three military service branches; five states; and four countries. The exercise is sponsored by Cyber Strong Nebraska, a non-profit organization created to plan and carry out the exercise. The Nebraska National Guard is one of several major partners of the effort, which includes multiple private, public and educational institutions. This year the exercise consisted of a week of classroom instruction where specialists listened to multiple nationally-renown cyber defense experts, received instructions on current and emerging threats, and learned about new cyber protection systems and techniques. For members of the military or civilian organizations attending the exercise, there were also opportunities to receive important credentialing and certifications. The second week of the instruction involved the specialists breaking into 16 separate “enclaves” and practicing identifying and responding to network attacks and intrusions on a virtual cyber range. Carlson said the cyber ranges essentially mimic the types of network systems the specialists work in daily. Built entirely within a “cloud” environment, the cyber ranges are completely isolated and require participants to receive credentials to log in and participate. Once there, Carlson said the environment replicates – on a smaller scale – an enterprise environment complete with internet facing servers and inward and outward-bound electronic traffic. “There is dummy traffic going through all the workstations and servers,” he said. “It looks like information coming in and out of the networks.” And within that constant stream of inbound and outbound information, “anomalies” are occurring. “[They] have to go and dig through the logs to find the artifacts that would point to indicators of compromise,” Carlson said. The types of attacks, Carlson said, increase in complexity throughout the week from ‘script kiddies’ to advanced persistent threats. “This is really about learning how to respond when it happens… because it will happen,” said Tim Pospisil, chief information security protection officer for Nebraska Public Power, who worked with Carlson to develop the initial idea into its current training and exercise format.
Developing skills, collaboration “I think it’s a good way to be introduced to a lot of the tools that people in the field use,” said Airman 1st Class Dulcie Archuleta, a vulnerability management specialist with the Nebraska Air National Guard’s 155th Communications Squadron. Archuleta was one of approximately a dozen Nebraska Army and Air National Guard cyber protection specialists who spent two weeks attending the training and participating in the exercise. They were joined by National Guardsmen representing the Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, Iowa and Vermont National Guard, as well as members of the Czech, Chilean and Tanzanian armed forces through the National Guard’s State Partnership Program. As a current University of Nebraska-Lincoln student working on her doctorate in Complex Biosystems, Cyber Tatanka gave Archuleta an opportunity to refine the cyber defense skills she learned at her Air Force technical school and monthly unit drill assemblies. “We’re getting to learn about all of the tools out there that are available to do things like forensics analysis and network analysis,” she said. “There are so many different options. [This gives us the chance] to figure out the best methods to use. And it isn’t always easy.” Nebraska Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Zachary Faraj, noncommissioned officer-in-charge of the Nebraska Army National Guard’s 179th Cyber Protection Team, said the exercise provided opportunities to hone his team’s skills in a realistic environment while also developing a better understanding of how current threats are continuously evolving. “There are different ways that they can hack or toggle into your system that you wouldn’t even think that’s possible… there’s just so many different things that you have to account for,” Faraj said. Another benefit of the exercise, he added, was the opportunity to meet and learn from other cyber defense specialists from different industries, states and nations. “It definitely helps you get to know and develop relationships with these other entities so that we don’t remain one-dimensional,” he said. “You start realizing that every place is going to have a different approach [to defending their networks]… that helps you know and expand upon the ways that we approach cyber defense.” The exchanging of that type of information, said Pospisil, is a critical goal of Cyber Tatanka. “We want to facilitate collaboration,” he said. Carlson agreed, saying exercise organizers encourage participants to meet their counterparts and develop a “rolodex” of specialists they can call upon to help address issues when they occur. It’s this level of current and potential collaboration to meet current and future threats that makes Cyber Tatanka extremely important and valuable, especially considering the cat-and-mouse nature of today’s cyber adversaries, said Strong. “I don’t think there will ever be a day where we can declare Victory in Cyber Day,” said Strong, adding that as organizations tighten their information security, adversaries will continue to look for new ways to sneak past those defenses. “But, we will win. And we will win every day because of the people in this room.”
| Date Taken: | 07.07.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 07.08.2025 12:51 |
| Story ID: | 542196 |
| Location: | NEBRASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 28 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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