Collaborative training and response communities-an alternative to traditional cyber defense escalation

In the United States, the State of Colorado\u27s Department of Transportation successfully defended and recovered from a recent severe malware attack. The 2018 attack at the Colorado Department of Transportation was mitigated by a rapid multi-agency incident response. This is the first case in the United States where a state\u27s National Guard responded to a governor\u27s declaration of a cyber emergency response. In anticipation of advanced threats to Colorado citizens, Regis University has hosted collaborative exercises with government, organizations, and industry as part of a larger Collaborative Training Response Community (CTRC) effort to facilitate collaborative physical exercises, governmental policy development, and relationship building. The resulting capabilities allowed for an effective response to this incident. The authors present a new incident response model, based on this case in the context of existing cybersecurity organizations extant in the U.S., that may be useful to private and public sector communities where collaborative incident response is appropriate