Three days after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Allied Transformation Command websites were knocked offline, the alliance has yet to release official comments over the cause of the outage that felled two military command websites.
The outages occurred during a NATO summit held in Warsaw last week, raising suspicions that Russian hackers could have attacked the websites in response to the summit's initiatives opposing Russian military aggression. “This is a suspicious timing for a technical failure,” a senior NATO official said, according to a Wall Street Journal report. “If this is a cyberattack, it would be no surprise.”
On Friday, NATO approved measures to place US, UK, Germany and Canada-led battalions along member nations' borders with Russia. The battalions are expected to be placed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland by early next year. The intergovernmental alliance also on Friday approved language that defines cyberspace as a domain of war.
Over the weekend, NATO approved an aid package to support the defense, security, and cybersecurity of Ukraine, a non-NATO-member that has been engaged in a prolonged cyber-conflict with Russia.
Earlier this month, a researcher discovered a campaign targeting Ukrainian officials. Login credentials of employees at the National Bank of Ukraine and the South Ukranian Nuclear Energy Complex, and other Ukrainian officials were dumped on Pastebin.
