Wired
February 3, 2012
BRUSSELS, Belgium — America’s top generals and intelligence officers openly admit that they’ve got no way of keeping up with the onslaught of attacks on U.S. networks. But a visit to NATO Headquarters makes the American brass look totally l33t.
Officials with the transatlantic military alliance say they totally get that they need to protect their networks from online infiltration and assault. They’ve embedded the concept of cybersecurity firmly into their planning for “emerging threats.”
They just don’t really know what it means. Nor do they know what to do about a major online attack. “We need to think these things through,” concedes Jamie Shea, NATO’s chief for confronting what it calls Emerging Security Challenges, who lists cybersecurity as one of his top priorities.
Here at NATO Headquarters, the 2007 denial-of-service attack that took websites of member nation Estonia offline forms something of a template for worry. But there’s also a dawning recognition that online threats are more persistent than episodic, like with the digital economic espionage into western networks coming from Russia and China. But they don’t yet know what kind of malicious online action would trigger a NATO response.
They also don’t know what exactly is up to the alliance to protect. The U.S. military, for instance, has (sorta) promised to (mostly) stay away from defending the civilian internet.