HKCERT Cyber Incident Response Drill Strengthens Local Readiness against Targeted Attacks

With a surge in targeted attacks, the 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, managed by the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC), 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 (Appendix).

For further enquiries, please contact S C Leung, Senior Consultant, HKCERT, at tel.: (852) 2788 5420 or email: scleung@hkpc.org. For incidents reporting or enquiries, please contact the HKCERT hotline at tel.: (852) 8105 6060, or email: hkcert@hkcert.org. For other media enquiries, please contact Felix Chan of HKPC at tel.: (852) 2788 5036 or email: felixchan@hkpc.org.

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Mr Jonathan Ho

General Manager

Corporate Communications

Tel: (852) 2788 6390

Fax: (852) 2788 5056

Email: jonathanho@hkpc.org

Website: www.hkpc.org

8 November 2013

HKCERT conducts a territory-wide drill to strengthen the preparedness of local internet service providers and mobile network operators to handle targeted attacks