Behind the walls of a high-security lab, NATO’s top cyber-minds are trying to predict the evolution of conflict in an Internet-dependent world.
While they play down disaster-movie scenarios of total meltdown, experts say cyber-attacks will be part and parcel of future fighting.
Tallinn is home to a cutting-edge unit known in NATO-speak as the Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence. The city is the capital of Estonia, whose flourishing high-tech industry has earned it the label “E-Stonia.”
“Definitely from the cyber-space perspective, I think we’ve gone further than we imagined in science fiction,” said Ilmar Tamm, the Estonian colonel at its helm.
Its base is a 1905 building where military communications experts have toiled away since the days of carrier pigeons and the telegraph.
The center’s dozens of experts second-guess potential adversaries, gazing into what they dub the “fifth battlespace,” after land, sea, air and space.
“The whole myriad and complex area makes it a very difficult problem to solve, and at the same time it keeps a very convenient gray area for the bad guys,” Tamm said. “Many states have realized that this is really something that can be used as a weapon ... That we should not ignore. It will have a future impact.”
“I’m not so naive that I’d say conventional warfare will go away, but we should expect it to be more combined,” he said.
Bitter experience taught Estonia — one of the world’s most wired places and a NATO member since 2004 — all about cyber-conflict.
The minnow country of 1.3 million people suffered blistering attacks in 2007 that took down business and government Web-based services for days.
“It clearly heralded the beginning of a new era,” Estonian Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said. “It had all the characteristics of cyber-crime growing into a national security threat. It was a qualitative change, and that clicked in very many heads.”
The assault came as Estonian authorities controversially shifted a Soviet-era war memorial from central Tallinn to a military cemetery.
The monument, erected when Moscow took over after World War II, following independence in 1991 became a flashpoint for disputes about the past with Estonia’s ethnic-Russian minority.
Tallinn was rocked by riots as the memorial was moved. Estonia blamed Russia for stoking the strife, and also said the cyber-offensive had been traced to official servers in Moscow.
Russia, whose relations with Estonia are rocky, denied involvement.
For Aaviksoo, cyber-attacks may “present a stand-alone security threat or a combined security threat.”
An example of the latter, he said, came during Russia’s 2008 war with ex-Soviet Georgia, as hackers hit Georgian Web sites while Moscow’s troops moved in.
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