Cyber attack on one Nato nation is attack on all

Writing in Prospect Magazine, Jens Stoltenberg has stressed that all 29 member countries would respond to a serious cyber attack on one of them.

Nato’s Secretary General said that such an incident would trigger a ‘collective defence commitment’, known as Article 5 of its founding treaty. Article 5 has not been triggered since the 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001.

However, given advances in cyber technology, he said that Nato was adapting to a ‘new reality’, saying that the organisation has ‘designated cyberspace a domain in which NATO will operate and defend itself as effectively as it does in the air, on land, and at sea’.

Stoltenberg cited the 2017 Wannacry ransomware attack which crippled the NHS in the UK and caused havoc around the world as an example of a major cyber incident, although this did not trigger Article 5.