From: Wave

Steven Sprague

NATO is acutely aware that cyberspace is becoming the arena for 21st century warfare. The international alliance, consisting of 28 member countries from North America and Europe, is focusing on preventing potential attacks, building resilience and throwing up rock-solid firewalls.

All NATO structures are being brought under centralized protection and new cyber defence requirements will be applied.

A recent report by the Atlantic Council outlined the importance of protecting cyberspace. “NATO’s central missions of collective defense and cooperative security must be as effective in cyberspace as they are in the other domains of air, land, sea, and space.”

NATO is often a target of hackers intent on infiltrating networks and stealing sensitive data, and no country within NATO is immune to these threats. “Each day, we are seeing up to 30 significant attacks on our digital networks or on individual computers, mostly by way of emails infected by spyware and sent to individual NATO employees,” Lieutenant General Kurt Herrmann told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Herrmann heads up a unit of 120 NATO computer experts whose task is protecting sensitive data belonging to the alliance.

In many cases, he told a recent conference in Belgium, attackers have made the effort to find out personal details about the target to make their mails more convincing. When the recipient opens the attachments, a piece of software known as a Trojan installs itself on the computer and begins transferring data to an overseas server.

Early in the air campaign over Libya in the spring of 2011, for example, a NATO website was hacked and the alliance was maliciously described as “murderers.” The attack, however, was discovered quickly and remedied.

NATO said the plan to create structures for centralized protection and new cyber defence requirements will help the alliance clarify political and operational mechanisms for responses to cyberattacks and set out a framework to assist members of the alliance, upon request, in their own cyber defence efforts. NATO’s aim is to “optimize information sharing and situational awareness, collaboration and secure interoperability based on NATO agreed standards.”

Trusted Computing standards provide a strong foundation that is already broadly available for NATO to leverage. With the backdrop of tightening budgets and increasing threats, it is critical to leverage the industry standards that are already in place. We look forward (see today’s announcement) to helping them realize the full benefits of this technology.