Northern Michigan University students recently participated in exercises with Northern Strike, the U-S Department of Defense’s largest joint military readiness exercises. Eight NMU information assurance/cyber defense students worked alongside military cybersecurity teams from the U.S. and NATO-ally Latvia August 11th and 12th. Their assigned mission was to regain control of a network used for communications and war command that had been compromised by a foreign adversary, determine how the network was infiltrated and remediate the vulnerability.
Northern Strike 24-2 took place at Camp Grayling's National All-Domain Warfighting Center. This year's exercise incorporated training scenarios involving homeland security and defense against unmanned aerial systems.
After the mission was completed, NMU was invited to a barbecue with troops from the 172nd Cyber Protection Team and the Latvian Cybersecurity Team. The NMU students and Latvian forces were given 172nd Cyber Operation insignia patches for their participation in the exercise.