What Business Leaders Need To Know About NATO’s New Cyber Initiative

A new initiative announced by NATO at its summit this week in Madrid has important implications for business leaders who are concerned about cyberattacks. The multinational organization said it will launch a rapid response force that will ramp up collaborations with military and civilian organizations to help meet cyber threats.

As important as it is to protect against and respond to cyber threats, the plan comes with built-in challenges and limitations.

Strengthening Cyber Defenses

“We are confronted by cyber, space, hybrid and other asymmetric threats, and by the malicious use of emerging and disruptive technologies,” NATO said in a statement. “We face systemic competition from those, including the People’s Republic of China, who challenge our interests, security, and values and seek to undermine the rules-based international order.”

“We will significantly strengthen our cyber defenses through enhanced civil-military cooperation,” the declaration says. “We will also expand partnership with industry. Allies have decided, on a voluntary basis and using national assets, to build and exercise a virtual rapid response cyber capability to respond to significant malicious cyber activities.”

Challenges

“Most of those in the cyber world are excited about this possibility but some challenges face it. First, it is all voluntary so countries and industries will have to want to actually do it. Second, each country may do something different so it could be patchwork in its establishment,” crisis management expert Baruch Labunski, CEO of Rank Secure said in an email interview.

“Finally, the joint effort of civilian industry and the military can be commendable or dangerous. It depends on your point of view and how one looks at government overreach,” he observed.

Taking Responsibility

NATO’s new program does not take the pressure off companies and organizations to protect themselves from cyberattacks.

“Cybersecurity teams must take responsibility as information warfare continues to become part of the rapidly evolving threat landscape,” Wasim Khaled, co-founder and CEO of Blackbird.AI said in an email.

“These new risks are driven by a new breed of threat actors who exploit digital media to drive harmful narratives that can [impact] organizations, employees, and executives using sophisticated tradecraft and technologies."

Hybrid Warfare

"In today's threat landscape, military adversaries and threat actors are combining cyber, information and kinetic attacks as a form of hybrid warfare that is highly effective when coordinated,” Khaled said. “The new NATO cyber rapid reaction force will help countries against cyberattacks that are designed to intimidate and disrupt an entire nation,” he observed.

‘No Surprise’

At least one cybersecurity expert was not surprised by NATO’s announcement.

“For those that work in the field of cybersecurity, NATO’s new strategy comes as no surprise. As we suspected and have now confirmed through the conflict in Ukraine, cyberspace is a critical dimension of operations in modern warfare,” Robert Stines, a partner in the Litigation Practice Group at Freeborn & Peters and a cybersecurity advisor said in a statement.

“We have also learned from past events that cyber threats tend to detrimentally impact the private sector,” he noted.

To Be Determined

“While we know very little about the scope of NATO’s new strategy, the pledge to work with the private sector to counter threats is very encouraging. Of course, the question becomes how does the private sector benefit from NATO’s new commitment,” Stines said.

“It will also be interesting to see how NATO plans …to bring together governments, the private sector, and academia to bolster NATO’s technological edge. I suspect that America’s technology giants (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) will have a role in the Accelerator,” he concluded.

3 Key Cyber Trends

Preventing and responding to cyberattacks continues to be a top priority and business leaders should be aware of three key related trends, according to Khaled. He said the trends include:

Convergence

“Convergence between information operations and traditional cyberattacks will continue to increase. Modern cybersecurity companies will integrate specialized information operations technology and fuse these capabilities with their existing cyber threat platforms.”

Attacks On Supply Chains

“Supply chain attacks will be on the rise due to ongoing economic shortages and disruptions through ransomware and other means in these critical times which could consist of holding victim’s data hostage, leaking and publicizing breaches, and attacking vendor supply chains.”

Ransomware

“Modern ransomware extortion will continue to proliferate across traditional enterprise environments. The market size for offensive skills has grown incredibly due to the potential payout size of cryptocurrency breaches that can exceed $100M on a single intrusion.”