The first national cyber exercise of the year was held on the premises of Jamk University of Applied Sciences (Jamk) on 3–7 February 2025.
The national cyber exercise (KYHA) held in Jyväskylä in week 6 was attended by a wide range of cyber security, management and communications professionals especially from the north of Finland and Northern Ostrobothnia. The cyber exercise aimed at municipalities and critical infrastructure operators took over a large part of Jamk’s Dynamo building for a week, where the JYVSECTEC (Jyväskylä Security Technology) research, development, and training center conducting the exercises is located.
“Almost 40 employees from the City of Rovaniemi attended the exercise, including senior management. Our service providers, ICT providers and critical operators from water and electricity companies also joined in,” says Harri Ihalainen, Chief Information Officer at Rovaniemi, who was one of the participants.
Four other municipalities, their service providers, and three critical infrastructure operators participated in the exercise in addition to Rovaniemi.
Exercises help participants cope with real life situations
The KYHA exercises play a special role in the development of Finland’s comprehensive security. The careful selection of participants of the exercise and the unique exercise environment enable organizations to understand how cybersecurity emergencies would affect their own and joint activities. It also opens up insight into how the situations could be reflected in society and for the individual citizen in real life.
“We noticed how professionally this exercise was organized. Rovaniemi is a tourist destination, and we gained experience in dealing with many kinds of threats that would affect, for example, our residents, visitors, and tour operators,” says Harri Ihalainen.
National model has provided training for thousands of experts
National cyber exercises aim to assemble a exercise team that includes both first-time participants in national exercises and experts in cybersecurity and related crisis situations who are re-training or taking on different roles
“It is important to involve new participants, as organizations can then comprehensively increase their skills and their knowledge of the cooperation. This time, the exercise for municipalities and critical infrastructure operators had a particularly large group of first-time participants,” says Rauli Paananen, National Cyber Security Director at the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland.
“It is an objective of the national cyber exercises to have at least 2,000 first-time participants between 2021 and 2025. The exercises also have more experienced participants who can support those attending for the first time,” says Tero Kokkonen, Director of Jamk’s Institute of Information Technology.
Nearly 150 trainees participated in the first KYHA exercise in 2025, including more than 1800 first-time participants since 2021. In total, national exercises have been organized since 2013.
The national cyber exercises are organized by the JYVSECTEC (Jyväskylä Security Technology) research, development and training centre located at Jamk’s Institute of Information Technology, in cooperation with the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland. The Security Committee of Finland contributes to the implementation of the exercises in a guiding role.
Inquiries
Rauli Paananen, National Cyber Security Director, Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland
rauli.paananen@gov.fi, tel. +358 295 342 212
Tero Kokkonen, Director, Institute of Information Technology, Jamk University of Applied Sciences
tero.kokkonen@jamk.fi, tel. +358 50 4385 317
