ESTONIA: NATO’s new centre of excellence is focusing on cyber defence
Slightly more than a year after Estonia became the first country in the world to come under a broad attack from the Internet in April 2007, NATO’s new Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (COE) was opened in Estonia’s capital Tallinn.
Estonia has always been pioneering in the development of public ICT and e-solutions. With hosting the centre the country hopes to strengthen its position and know-how in the issues of cyber security. Deliberate “cyber attacks” have become a serious threat but policies and measures for countering them still have to be developed. Establishment of the centre reflects the common understanding in NATO that there is a need to protect key information systems and develop the ability to counter a cyber attack.
Five focus areas
The centre in Estonia will conduct research and training on cyber warfare and include a staff of 30 persons, half of them from the sponsoring countries, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain. Norway is a cooperating partner of the centre.
Main focus areas of the new centre are:
• Improving cyber defence interoperability within NATO
• Cooperative cyber defence doctrine and concept development
• Enhancing information security & cyber defence education, awareness, and training
• Providing cyber defence support for experimentation (including on-site) for experimentation
• Analysing the legal aspects of cyber defence.
Concerted attempt to paralyse Estonia’s Internet
During the cyber attacks on Estonia in 2007 anonymous foreign networks of hundreds of thousands of computers repeatedly disabled Estonia's Internet servers used by the government, by banks, media, and other organisations by bombarding them with information requests, trying to paralyse the society that is today heavily dependant on Internet. These remotely controlled computers across the world, infected with malicious software without their owners' knowledge temporarily brought down the Internet servers of many Estonian public institutions and companies.
Estonia sought to implicate the Russian government in orchestrating if not ordering the attacks. However, the nature of such attacks makes it virtually impossible to track the people behind them, as the computers used in them participate as "zombies," controlled by means of malicious software installed without the knowledge of their owners.
The attacks were serious enough to alarm NATO which until then had primarily addressed the protection of its own systems. This, to a large extent, consisted of protecting NATO's encrypted communication and information system that handle the traffic of classified information throughout the Alliance.
Vulnerability exposed
The attacks on Estonia, however, were conducted only against open, public websites and served as a reminder of the vulnerabilities of key systems in open, modern societies to acts of hostility. They also demonstrated that the alliance’s cyber defence policy should also include protection of critical communication systems beyond the encrypted networks.
NATO’s centres of excellence
NATO-accredited COEs provide expertise in support of transformation and interoperability, especially in the fields of doctrine and concept development and validation, training, education and exercises, as well as analysis and lessons learned. All together the alliance has 10 such centres - one of them, the Cold Weather Operations COE, is located in Norway.
Sources: NATO, MOD Estonia, Radio Free Europe
Contact Tiina Link, tiina.link@innovasjonnorge.no