Tim Mahon
A recent exercise in Bydgoszcz, Poland, hosted by the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Education and Training Centre (JATEC) tested the alliance’s readiness to counter hybrid and asymmetric threats, including cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and disinformation campaigns instigated by and conducted with AI-enabled support. Like the curate’s egg, the result was “good in parts,” as it revealed fundamental gaps in readiness.
Ukrainian specialists within JATEC launched multiple attacks on power generation and distribution networks, financial systems and critical infrastructure assets such as flood defences. Simultaneously, AI-generated social media campaigns disrupted communications, spread confusion and eroded confidence in the authorities, undermining public trust and making coordinated, effective responses far more difficult to plan and implement.
This was not just theory become a training reality, however: the attack scenarios drew much of their inspiration from real-world examples of how Moscow has attacked and disrupted critical services: the attack on the Viasat KA_SAT network immediately prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, subsequent attacks on national communications networks that affected core systems and millions of users and the destruction of scores of Ukraine government databases affecting social and taxpayer records.
The challenges revealed by the exercise show weakness not, as might have been expected, in detection and mitigation of cyberattacks, but in broader and more fundamental issues: information sharing, decision alignment and maintenance of public confidence and trust while simultaneously fending off disruption and denial of service from multiple vectors. The biggest single difficulty, according to some observers, came in coordinating and synchronizing responses from distributed participants.
DA Comment
Hybrid warfare is a reality: it has already arrived. Ukraine and other conflict surfaces show us this. NATO needs urgently to address strengthening of collective cyber resilience and to streamline, facilitate and enhance decision-making processes that can generate and implement countermeasures at the speed of relevance. Initiatives such as the Cyber Coalition and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence will certainly help – but there are few laurels on which to rest and the alliance desperately needs to prepare more comprehensively for AI-enabled hybrid warfare.
