From: NATO

By  Fred Jordan, Agata Szydelko

On 12-13 June, the five founding nations of the Multinational Cyber Defence Capability Development (MN CD2) Project: Canada (Lead Nation), Denmark, Norway, Romania and The Netherlands met for the second official MN CD2 Board meeting at the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency in The Hague, Netherlands.

During the Board meeting, the participating nations discussed and validated the first stage of the three work packages currently being implemented under the MN CD2 collaboration framework.

The first work package will provide participating nations with a capability to exchange cyber incident information (including malware information) between their national Computer Security Incident Response Teams. The second work package will allow participating nations to improve their national situational awareness for cyber defence through the development of specific information repository and visualization interfaces. In the third work package, participating nations will pool their national resources to investigate ways to detect malicious activities performed by advanced persistent threats and facilitate the assessment of attacks and the damage that they have caused.

Three nations will participate to the first work package while four will be part of the second one. The third work package is currently under discussion and up to five nations could be contributing to it in the near future. In all cases, the Agency provides the technical expertise and project office support required for the successful execution of the project.

This project is part of the Secretary General’s Smart Defence drive. It is a Tier1 project in the Smart Defence project proposals database, with the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Board (C3B) as the Sponsor Committee.