About 150 NATO cyber specialists gathered in Tallinn, Estonia this week, to prepare for the possibility of cyberwarfare, Politico reports.
This scenario has become a real possibility for NATO member states and their allies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the publication notes, noting that Kiev, in addition to missile attacks, is being asked to defend itself against ongoing efforts by Russian hackers to make life more difficult for Ukrainians. "It's obvious that these things are actually happening," said Colonel Bernd Hansen, head of the cyber division at NATO's Allied Command Transformation.
NATO cyber powers are closely monitoring the war in Ukraine, both to find ways to help Kiev and to prevent Russia from breaching infrastructure of Alliance member states. The war in Ukraine has given urgency to NATO's annual exercise, in which more than 40 member states, allies and other organizations work together to respond to simulated cyberattacks on critical infrastructure such as power grids and ships. Nearly 1,000 cyber professionals participated in the exercise remotely from their home countries.
The world has never experienced an all-out cyber war in which cyber attacks are used with the same devastating results as physical strikes - such as disrupting critical services like electricity and water supply and preventing their restoration. The situation in Ukraine, however, is on the brink of collapse, the same publication notes.
In this context, cybersecurity officials and technical experts from Europe, the US and Japan gathered in Tallinn to respond, on a scenario basis, to cyber attacks against a specific territory. The scenario predicted that on November 28, hackers launched a digital attack on an island between Iceland and Norway in an attempt to steal information and bring down the power grid. NATO did not provide details of the exercise, which was nevertheless deemed a success, according to U.S. Navy Colonel Charles Elliott, who directed the exercise.
The war in Ukraine has sparked questions about how NATO would respond to a large-scale cyberattack against a member state that could potentially invoke Article 5. For example, the government of Albania considered invoking Article 5 this year after a widespread Iranian cyber-attack on the country's networks. Under Article 5, a potential attack against a member state is considered an attack against all NATO members.
The difficulty of keeping hackers out of networks makes it even more important to practice how to respond once they have infiltrated networks, officials say. They still said they incorporated scenarios and lessons learned from cyberattacks on Ukrainian infrastructure this year, including power grids.
The exercise was conducted at NATO's Cyber Range, a building designed and opened in 2021 to serve as a training center for NATO cybersecurity experts on how to coordinate and respond to attacks like the ones now underway in Ukraine. The building provides cyber professionals with a secure location with autonomous computer networks that can simulate cyber disasters. The building has both unclassified and classified spaces and rarely opens its doors to the press in an effort to keep operations secure. Finally, participants were prohibited from bringing personal devices into the simulation area.
Source: ertnews.gr
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