NATO Setting Up Cyber Warfare Center

NATO plans to set up a cyber defense center in Estonia later this year to research and help fight cyber warfare, the organization announced Wednesday.

The Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence will operate out of Tallinn, Estonia, with a staff of 30. Half of the specialists at the center will come from its seven sponsoring countries: Germany, Italy, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Estonia.

Cyber warfare has been on NATO’s radar for the past year, following the widely reported cyber attack against member country Estonia in May 2007. The attacks, which security experts have compared to a poorly coordinated cyber brawl, succeeded in knocking some financial systems in the country off-line for several hours, prompting Estonia to ask for help from NATO.

The attacks were sparked by the relocation of the Soviet war memorial in downtown Tallinn, a move that angered the country’s ethnic Russians. Russia was blamed for the attacks, although no Kremlin connection to the cyber-incident has been proven.

Allied defense ministers pressed for a NATO cyber defense policy at their October 2007 meeting, a move that led to the creation of the Cyber Defense Center, NATO said in a statement.

The center will help NATO “defy and successfully counter the threats in this area,” said General James Mattis, NATOs supreme allied commander, transformation, in the statement.

The new cyber warfare center is expected to be online in August and will be formally opened sometime in 2009, according to an Associated Press report.