NATO to help Estonia’s cyber defense
Last year Estonia became the first nation to suffer a systematic, sustained cyber attack that brought the Baltic nation’s infrastructure to halt; Russian nationalists, and probably agencies of the Russian government, were implicated in the attack; NATO wants to help
Members of NATO are obligated to help each other in the event one of them is attacked. In today’s world, this means helping each other in the event a member state is cyber-attacked. Seven NATO nations on Tuesday backed a new cyber defense center in Estonia, the former Soviet state which last year faced weeks of denial of service attacks on its internet infrastructure after a row with Russia over the location of a memorial to red Army soldiers who lost their lives during the Second World War. Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Spain agreed to help fund and staff the center in the Estonian capital Tallinn. The United States will initially send an observer to the project, aimed at boosting defenses against such attacks. “We have seen in Estonia that a cyber attack can swiftly become an issue of national security. Cyber attacks can cripple societies,” NATO spokesman James Appathurai said after a signing ceremony in Brussels. The center will become fully operational in August with around thirty staff providing research, consultation, training, and development of cyber defenses, which will remain the prime responsibility of national governments.
Estonia’s decision last year to remove the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of Tallinn sparked rioting by mainly Russian-speaking citizens, a row with Moscow, and four weeks of cyber attacks which its president blamed on Russia. Moscow has denied any involvement in the flood of data which overloaded servers and caused computers to crash, with Estonian officials saying its banks were briefly targeted. Some analysts see “cyber war” as one of the world’s emerging security risks, but many NATO nations are reluctant to recognize it as such. They fear that such attacks could become grounds for invoking the alliance’s mutual defense clause — the NATO pledge to defend other members under attack. This worry notwithstanding, last month’s NATO summit included an agreement to study any request for help by any ally facing a cyber attack.
