NATO cybersecurity center gets a superpower boost

Moscow can’t be thrilled that this is happening right across its border: The United States has joined NATO’s cyber defense research center in Estonia that works on ways to combat cyber attacks. The multinational center was created in 2008 after Estonia’s government and corporate computer networks came under attack the year before following a dispute ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Moscow can't be thrilled that this is happening right across its border:

Moscow can’t be thrilled that this is happening right across its border:

The United States has joined NATO’s cyber defense research center in Estonia that works on ways to combat cyber attacks.

The multinational center was created in 2008 after Estonia’s government and corporate computer networks came under attack the year before following a dispute with neighboring Russia.

The United States will help fund the center, and its scientists and cyber defense experts will be able to both study and teach at the center’s premises in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

As NATO elaborates its cyberdefense policy, the Russian threat looms large:

A series of major cyber attacks on Estonian public and private institutions in April and May 2007 prompted NATO to take a harder look at its cyber defences. At a meeting in June 2007, the NATO Defence Ministers agreed that urgent work was needed in this area. In the months to follow, NATO conducted a thorough assessment of its approach to cyber defence…In the summer of 2008, the war in Georgia demonstrated that cyber attacks have the potential to become a major component of conventional warfare. The development and use of destructive cyber tools that can threaten national and Euro-Atlantic security and stability represent a strategic shift that has increased the urgency for a new NATO cyber defence policy in order to strengthen the cyber defences not only of NATO Headquarters and its related structures, but across the Alliance as a whole.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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