CDCiber (Centro de Defesa Cibernética)

securitynetworking

Brazil's military cyber defence centre, created in 2010 under the Ministry of Defence and later expanded into a full command.

Brazil's military cyber defence centre, created 2010. Its first assignment was monitoring a United Nations conference, which is how such organisations usually begin.

Created by ministerial order in August 2010 and inaugurated the following year, with a first assignment that says a great deal about how such organisations actually begin: monitoring the network of the Rio+20 United Nations conference in June 2012. Not a war, not an incident - an event with a fixed date, a defined perimeter and a guaranteed audience. That is the standard way a new capability gets built, because a scheduled event supplies a deadline, a budget and a visible result, and the resulting organisation outlives the event that justified it. The team assembled for it is the more interesting detail: army, air force and navy personnel alongside technicians from the federal police cybercrime unit and the telecommunications regulator. Cyber defence forces organisations to mix in ways conventional defence does not, because the infrastructure being defended is civilian, the expertise is scattered across agencies that do not normally share a room, and the attacker does not respect the boundary between crime and conflict. The subsequent cooperation with the federal data-processing company - including forensic computing training - reflects the same reality: the state's operational knowledge of its own networks sat in a civilian company, and the military needed it. Every country works through some version of this problem, and the arrangements it produces are usually more revealing than the doctrine written about them.

Also known as: cdciber, comdciber, centro de defesa cibernetica

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