Critical Infrastructure Protection

While it is widely accepted that cyber threats qualify as one of the major security issues of our time, their real scope has been appreciated only recently. In particular, as witnessed more vividly with the 2017 spread of the Wannacry ransomware, cyber offenders pose a serious societal threat. For this reason, Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) is increasingly mentioned in national security documents all over the world. In this chapter we will discuss how is NATO dealing with the problem, with a view to assessing whether the alliance is well equipped, or not, to provide security to its members (and possibly beyond). We will thus depart from a concise review of the literature aimed at showing the complexities of CIP; we will then move to discuss NATO’s approach to CIP; in particular, we will take as case studies the 2007 attack on Estonia and the 2017 NotPetya Ransomware. Finally, in the concluding section, we will draw our conclusions and provide some policy prescriptions.