Seven NATO nations and the Allied Command Transformation signed the documents for the formal establishment of a Cooperative Cyber Defence (CCD) Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Talin, Estonia, the alliance said yesterday.
Marine Gen. James Mattis, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (ACT), and Estonian Chief of Defence Lt. Gen. Ants Laaneots, signed the Memorandum of Understanding.
The center will conduct research and training on cyber warfare and have a staff of 30, half of them specialists from the sponsoring countries: Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain.
“The need for a cyber defense center to be opened today is compelling,” said Mattis, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, at the signing ceremony. “It will help NATO defy and successfully counter the threats in this area.”
The agreement comes a year after a major cyber attack on Estonian public and private institutions prompted NATO to conduct a thorough assessment of its approach to cyber defence. At their meeting in October 2007, Allied Defense Ministers called for the development of a NATO cyber defence policy that was adopted early 2008.
The policy includes a Cyber Defence Management Authority that brings together the key actors in NATO’s cyber defence activities. The authority will manage cyber defense across all NATO’s communication and information systems and could support individual allies in defending against cyber attacks upon request.
At the 2002 Prague Summit, NATO leaders directed that a technical NATO Cyber Defence Program be implemented, which now includes the currently functioning NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC).
In April 2008, the Bucharest Summit Declaration paved the way for the establishment of the Estonian CoE, emphasizing the need for NATO members to protect key information systems and develop the ability to counter a cyber attack, the alliance said.
The Centers of Excellence are national training centers that ACT recognizes as providing high-quality education and training to the Euro-Atlantic community. These centers are funded nationally or multinationally and have individual relationships with NATO formalized through memoranda of understanding.
NATO has nine fully accredited CoEs, the Center for Analysis & Simulation for the Preparation of Air Operations; the Civil-Military Cooperation CoE; the Cold Weather Operations CoE; the combined Joint Operations from the Sea CoE, the Command & Control CoE, the Joint Air Power Competence Center CoE, the Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiation, & Nuclear Defence CoE and the Naval Mine Warfare CoE.