CLAW 2023

The Crisis Management Workshop for the GÉANT Community

CLAW 2023 in person event | 5-6 December 2023, hosted by PSNC, Poznan, Poland
If you work for an NREN and are keen to gain some basic crisis management skills in a collaborative and friendly environment and in a simulation context, CLAW is the perfect event for you! Representatives from Communications, NOC, CSIRT and Information Security Management are all welcome to join CLAW to work together on crisis management issues while safely experiencing a very well organised and flawlessly staged simulation exercise of a crisis situation. Seeing is believing!
(Scroll down for more information on the CLAW 2023 programme).

Blue Team Training
A Blue Team Training event will take place just before CLAW 2023, on 5 December, 09:00-13:00, at PSNC, Poznan. The training will be led by Klaus Möller, Stefan Kelm and Tobias Dussa from DFN-CERT. The Blue-Team Training provides a hands-on opportunity for system administrators and interested users to gain first experience in identifying and deflecting attacks in a secure sand-box environment. The simulated attacks will be detected by means of logfile analysis using Elasticsearch. The training is primarily designed for people with limited experience of IT Forensics. Although we welcome participants with more experience, we do not recommend it for highly experienced professionals. Find out more about Blue Team Training.

CLAW 2023 Preliminary Programme

Tuesday 5 December | Day 1
14:00-16:00
Welcome and Keynote

The Halifax explosion of 1917 – what happens afterwards? | Anna Wilson, HEAnet
On 6th November 1917, the SS Mont Blanc sailed into Halifax, Nova Scotia containing a startling cargo of explosives and munitions destined for Allied forces in World War I. On the same morning, the SS Imo sailed out, empty and in a hurry. They collided, causing the largest man-made explosion to date. Anna’s talk will not focus on the explosion itself, but on what happened before, and what happened after. We can learn a lot by tearing apart the contributing factors to the explosion, finding what mistakes were made, and understanding why they were made. We’ll learn how to avoid and deal with accidents by looking at how other industries have responded to theirs. We’ll learn the limitations of ’root cause’ as a concept, understand more about why mistakes are made, how to spot the signs of scapegoating and manage them. [Content note: this talk will include discussion of loss of life].

About Anna
Anna Wilson graduated in Computer Science from University College Dublin in 1996, and straight away went next door to work for HEAnet, the Irish NREN. Anna has been with HEAnet in some capacity ever since. Her focus throughout has been on the IP network, and she is known for her work in various GÉANT activities and her participation in RIPE, including a recent stint as co-chair of the IPv6 working group. Anna is currently building a robot army for the Services Architecture Team in HEAnet.

16:00-16:30
Break
16:30-17:30
Exercise: Part 1
19:30-21:30
Working dinner
Wednesday 6 December | Day 2
09:00-09:30
Welcome and coffee
09:30-11:30
Exercise: Part 2
11:30-12:00
Break
12:00-13:00
Lightning Talks
13:00-14:00
Lunch
14:00-17:00
Parallel training sessions

How to Win a Crisis | Wouter Beijersbergen van Henegouwen
During this workshop we will reflect on the exercise in which participants will have already taken part, examine which success factors were based on theories and experience, and possibly identify any pitfalls too. Participants will receive practical tools to enhance their chances of success during a crisis, and will also be given the opportunity to apply these straight away in a brief a short follow-up exercise called the Second Chance Exercise. The training is hands-on and interactive with a focus on maximising the learning outcomes from the crisis exercise.

Wouter Beijersbergen van HenegouwenAbout Wouter
For nearly a decade I dedicated myself to the realm of crisis management at Trimension, serving both government entities and private businesses. My role encompassed a wide array of critical aspects, including crisis management response, strategic planning, decision-making, and conducting crisis exercises. In 2021, I embarked on a new chapter in my career as a safety advisor for the municipality of Lansingerland. This role also saw me assume responsibilities as a crisis and project manager, overseeing various initiatives aimed at enhancing the safety and resilience of the community. On 1 November 2022 I became Assignment Manager for Resilience at the municipality of The Hague. This role presents a fresh set of challenges and opportunities, allowing me to further refine my skills in crisis management and resilience-building.

Teamwork! | Marthe Huibers
A crisis situation often demands the utmost from organisations and professionals and good collaboration can make all the difference. But a group of motivated, experienced and/or brilliant professionals does not automatically form a motivated, experienced and/or brilliant team that takes the best decisions. In the workshop Teamwork! we’re going to look for those elements that can make teamwork successful and of real added value, instead of (and I quote) “just a – sometimes slightly frustrating – way to share information” or even (and I quote again) “a process that takes all the energy out”. In other words: we’ll be answering the question “How to turn a team of Experts into an Expert Team?”

Together we investigate the four levels at which a team performs, what the success- and fail factors of teamwork are especially in times of crises, and how to timely recognise and avoid common pitfalls in teamwork. Also, we look at individual roles in teams: what kind of team player are you during crises and what effect does this have on your teammates? Of course, we immediately apply the lessons learned to the CLAW team that you take part in during the workshop: are you able to work together as a solid team when the situation requires it…?

Marthe HuibersAbout Marthe
Marthe Huibers is an organisational psychologist, fascinated by (effective and ineffective) human behaviour, especially in the context of teams and organisations. It never ceases to amaze her to see what people in “effective” teams can achieve when working together (unfortunately, it also keeps surprising her how ineffective teamwork can cause brilliant people to achieve very mediocre to downright bad results…). After working as a trainer/consultant in the field of crisis management for over 10 years, she is now trainer and team coach for leaders and teams, teaching them to (re)discover and work at their fullest (crisis-)potential.

How to create your own exercise | Charlie van Genuchten
Since the launch of CLAW in 2017 we have been continuously improving the format of our crisis management exercises, and producing material to enable NRENs across the globe to develop and recreate similar crisis simulation workshops for their organisations. We will look at the steps needed to create successful crisis exercises, how to make them work and how, through trial and error, we learn what doesn’t work. This training will help NRENs who aim to organise a small exercise for their own organisation, as well as larger scale exercises for their constituencies (like OZON in the Netherlands).

Charlie van GenuchtenAbout Charlie
Charlie van Genuchten is Product Manager Privacy and Security at SURF. She organised the first large-scale crisis exercise for SURFnet in 2016 and has been creating exercises with and for Dutch Higher Education Institutions every year since then. In 2017, she created the European CLAW Crisis Management Event for National Research and Education Networks, which she considers ‘one of the most fun things in my life’.

CLAW Online

CLAW online 2023, a shorter repeat edition of CLAW 2022, took place on 2 May 2023. It started with simple introductions to crisis exercises and crisis management, followed by a brief outline of the online hands-on crisis exercise. Participants were split into online groups and took active part in an engaging exercise. The actual simulation lasted about two hours and the event closed with a session on lessons learned.

Programme
Date: 2 May 2023
Time: 13:00 – 17:00 CEST

Agenda
13:00 → 13:30 Basics of Crisis Management, Speakers: Maria Edblom Tauson (SUNET) and Anne-Marie Achrenius (SUNET)
13:30 → 13:45 Introduction to the Crisis Exercise
13:45 → 14:00 BREAK
14:00 → 16:00 Crisis Exercise
16:15 → 17:00 Lessons learned

 

To find out more about past CLAW events, please visit: https://security.geant.org/claw-workshop/

 

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