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As a point of clarification, DND's original cyber operations were stood up fully in 1999, vis a vis the Information Protection Centre (IPC), comprising the DND Computer Incident Response Team (DND CIRT) and National Vulnerability Assessment Team (NVAT). I led the former at my retirement in 2001.

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Thanks! I didn't have dates for those until now, definitely noting for future use.

In this article I was largely referring to when CSE began to do penetration testing of DND/CAF networks in the early 2000s, but will clarify that.

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We were doing our own. You'd be, maybe, surprised that CSE's own capability in that regard was still pretty immature as well. We can have a chat about their attempts to grab data from the private sector during the early 2K's. I managed CGI's capability back then and had many run ins.

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Very interesting to hear DND/CAF doing penetration testing back then as well. Earliest that I have for CSE penetration testing DND/CAF is October 2022, but the definitions and language they use here it could mean something else (https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2022-02-14/04-en-part-2.html). It suggests that DND/CAF was the first that CSE pen tested.

We definitely do need to have a chat. There's so little public information about DND/CAF cyber in 1990s and 2000s that It was a big win for me when I found an old unit Christmas letter that just a single sentence that was useful.

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