The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced the formation of a cyber rapid response force program to strengthen its organization-wide defense at the Madrid Summit Declaration last month, in response to an uptick in geopolitical threats. 

NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, adopted at the summit, aired the need for a joint cyber response program. The strategy reaffirms that a cyberattack on any member country of NATO will be recognized as an attack to the alliance as a whole, according to the Declaration.

The expansion of cyber capabilities in NATO’s military alliance will garner the ability to quickly share threat intelligence, threat actors, and aid others if an attack occurs.

“If there is an infrastructure attack in Poland, now you get the resources, the U.S. and the U.K., some of the more sophisticated cyber organizations come in and help them,” noted Arctic Wolf Chief Product Officer Dan Schiappa. 

“Every nation within NATO has their own cyber defense capabilities and cyber-offensive capabilities. That's been a standard procedure for governments for decades,” he added. “What hasn't been a standard procedure is the ability to share that intel freely amongst those countries.”

However, the restated collaboration could also unleash more attacks from Russia. “If the world starts to align against Russia, you're going to start seeing more of them attacking out against those organizations that are aligning against them,” said Schiappa.

The most concerning cyberthreat from Russia is attacks against critical infrastructure, financial systems, and military operations, which are significant areas NATO seeks to protect. 

“You can imagine [Russia] going into a country and impacting their power grid, that would be pretty impactful and massively disruptive,” Schiappa theorized. “It could be impacting their financial systems, so money can't move, stocks can’t transact, or directly against the military itself. Those are like the worst case scenarios– the ‘Cyber Storm’ so to speak.”

Industry advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing can help mature defense capabilities, but it's important to remember that with great power comes great responsibility, and “no matter how much technology advances, it can be used for good or evil,” said Schiappa.

“It's a cat and mouse game. So if we improve our defensive capabilities with those, they're gonna prove their offensive capabilities with those as well.”

Cooperation among member countries of NATO will be crucially important in the rapid response program’s success. Member countries responding as a unified front will push more readily, effective armor for future nation-state threats and mitigate against a “Cyber Storm.”

As one of the members, the U.S. government announced plans to participate in the voluntary program. The government will offer “robust national capabilities” in efforts to mitigate growing concerns of Russia and China targeting the United States and other allied countries, according to a White House fact sheet.

The U.S. private sector will also play a role in protecting critical infrastructure with their own products and services, as well as collaborating with government agencies. In recent years, the private sector has been more open to sharing threat intelligence. 

“We actually have productized methods to publish and then disseminate that [threat] information to the industry. More and more companies publish information that they discover about certain attacks and certain threat actors much more rapidly,” Schiappa said. “Gone are the days of a company having some data and keeping it to themselves for their own advantage.”