The FS-ISAC has organized a cyber defense exercise called Locked Shields, in which almost 30 financial firms, including Barclays, CME Group, and Mastercard, will participate. The exercise will span multiple days and involve a series of intricate and interconnected cyber attacks on a fictional country, targeting its military, government, critical infrastructure, and financial services.

The FS-ISAC, a non-profit member organization, has created a scenario that replicates real-life payment system outages caused by a central bank, which adversely affect the financial system. The organization claims that the scenario is based on the outages experienced by major central banks globally in recent years, but with lesser severity.

Steven Silberstein, the CEO of FS-ISAC, said that the participation of the organization's global members would enable them to mitigate and assess threats by crowdsourcing exercise responses. He added that this exercise would help build the muscle memory of members and the financial sector to respond effectively to real-time cyber warfare.