Building Cyber Resilience Against Hybrid Threats

Today’s security environment is increasingly complex and unpredictable, with cyber attacks and hybrid warfare blurring the lines between conventional and unconventional forms of conflict, threats to energy security such as climate change and natural disasters, and disruptive technologies like AI and quantum computing. The challenge of adapting and responding to these threats calls for cooperation and novel ways of thinking. This book presents 11 edited contributions from the NATO Advanced Training Course (ATC) Strengthening SEE Resilient Cyber Defense against Hybrid Threats (STRENGTH), held as an online event from 26 September – 02 October 2021. The ATC brought together more than 60 military and civilian expert participants with 19 renowned professors, experts and practitioners from 14 NATO Member and Partner countries as speakers and lecturers. The ATC aimed to raise awareness about the Alliance and the South Eastern Europe (SEE) evolving complex-threat environment and establish the foundation for a long-term multidisciplinary collaboration among defense and security experts and academia, with the event serving as a first step in the creation of a SEE Network of defense-security and academic experts which can work across borders, linking state of the art of research and practice to build resilience against hybrid warfare capabilities. Participants learned how state and non-state actors acquire hybrid threats via cyberspace to achieve their strategic ends, and took part in working groups, moderated by invited speakers/lecturers, engaging in the productive discussion of questions related to the course topic. The event concluded with briefings presenting relevant case studies and lessons learned.

Hybrid threats represent one of the rising challenges to the safe and effective management of digital systems worldwide. The deliberate misuse or disruption of digital technologies has wide-ranging implications for fields as diverse as medicine, social media, and homeland security. Despite growing concern about cyber threats within many government agencies and international organizations, few strategies for the effective avoidance and management of threats or the prevention of the disruption they can cause have so far emerged. This book presents multiple perspectives based upon a NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme Advanced Research Workshop on ‘Resilience and Hybrid Threats’ held in Pärnu, Estonia from 26-29 August 2018, and includes a mixture of workshop summary papers and invited perspectives from world experts. Topics include the development of strategies for the protection and recovery of systems affected by hybrid threats, and the benefits of those strategies under different disruption scenarios. The role of risk and resilience assessment pertaining to the information domain is a common focus across all perspectives. Offering an overview of resilience-based decision making through an approach that integrates the threats and dependencies related to infrastructural, informational, and social considerations, the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the security of digital systems.

This book presents a standard methodology approach to cyber-resilience. Readers will learn how to design a cyber-resilient architecture for a given organization as well as how to maintain a state of cyber-resilience in its day-to-day operation. Readers will know how to establish a state of systematic cyber-resilience within this structure and how to evolve the protection to correctly address the threat environment. This revolves around the steps to perform strategic cyber-resilience planning, implementation and evolution. Readers will know how to perform the necessary activities to identify, prioritize and deploy targeted controls and maintain a persistent and reliable reporting system.

Hybrid conflicts are characterized by multi-layered efforts to undermine the functioning of the State or polarize society. This book presents results, recommendations and best practices from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) "Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Hybrid Warfare Security Related Challenges", held in Stockholm, Sweden, in May 2016. The main objective of this workshop was to help and support NATO in the field of hybrid conflicts by developing a set of tools to deter and defend against adversaries mounting a hybrid offensive. Addressing the current state of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and the challenges evolving in the region due to non-traditional threats which often transcend national borders – such as cyber attacks, terrorism, and attacks on energy supply – the widely ranging group of international experts who convened for this workshop provided solutions from a number of perspectives to counter the new and emerging challenges affecting the security of modern infrastructure. Opportunities for public-private partnerships in NATO member and partner countries were also identified. The book provides a highly topical resource which identifies common solutions for combating major hazards and challenges – namely cyber attacks, terrorist attacks on energy supply, man-made disasters, information warfare and maritime security risks – and will be of interest to all those striving to maintain stability and avoid adverse effects on the safety and well-being of society.

This book introduces fundamental concepts of cyber resilience, drawing expertise from academia, industry, and government. Resilience is defined as the ability to recover from or easily adjust to shocks and stresses. Unlike the concept of security - which is often and incorrectly conflated with resilience -- resilience refers to the system's ability to recover or regenerate its performance after an unexpected impact produces a degradation in its performance. A clear understanding of distinction between security, risk and resilience is important for developing appropriate management of cyber threats. The book presents insightful discussion of the most current technical issues in cyber resilience, along with relevant methods and procedures. Practical aspects of current cyber resilience practices and techniques are described as they are now, and as they are likely to remain in the near term. The bulk of the material is presented in the book in a way that is easily accessible to non-specialists. Logical, consistent, and continuous discourse covering all key topics relevant to the field will be of use as teaching material as well as source of emerging scholarship in the field. A typical chapter provides introductory, tutorial-like material, detailed examples, in-depth elaboration of a selected technical approach, and a concise summary of key ideas.

Until recently, the Arctic was almost impossible for anyone other than indigenous peoples and explorers to traverse. Pervasive Arctic sea ice and harsh climatological conditions meant that the region was deemed incapable of supporting industrial activity or a Western lifestyle. In the last decade, however, that longstanding reality has been dramatically and permanently altered. Receding sea ice, coupled with growing geopolitical disputes over Arctic resources, territory, and transportation channels, has stimulated efforts to exploit newly-open waterways, to identify and extract desirable resources, and to leverage industrial, commercial, and transportation opportunities emerging throughout the region. This book presents papers from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) Governance for Cyber Security and Resilience in the Arctic. Held in Rovaniemi, Finland, from 27-30 January 2019, the workshop brought together top scholars in cybersecurity risk assessment, governance, and resilience to discuss potential analytical and governing strategies and offer perspectives on how to improve critical Arctic infrastructure against various human and natural threats. The book is organized in three sections according to topical group and plenary discussions at the meeting on: cybersecurity infrastructure and threats, analytical strategies for infrastructure threat absorption and resilience, and legal frameworks and governance options to promote cyber resilience. Summaries and detailed analysis are included within each section as summary chapters in the book. The book provides a background on analytical tools relevant to risk and resilience analytics, including risk assessment, decision analysis, supply chain management and resilience analytics. It will allow government, native and civil society groups, military stakeholders, and civilian practitioners to understand better on how to enhance the Arctic’s resilience against various natural and anthropogenic challenges.

Modern cyber systems acquire more emergent system properties, as far as their complexity increases: cyber resilience, controllability, self-organization, proactive cyber security and adaptability. Each of the listed properties is the subject of the cybernetics research and each subsequent feature makes sense only if there is a previous one.Cyber resilience is the most important feature of any cyber system, especially during the transition to the sixth technological stage and related Industry 4.0 technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud and foggy computing, 5G +, IoT/IIoT, Big Data and ETL, Q-computing, Blockchain, VR/AR, etc. We should even consider the cyber resilience as a primary one, because the mentioned systems cannot exist without it. Indeed, without the sustainable formation made of the interconnected components of the critical information infrastructure, it does not make sense to discuss the existence of 4.0 Industry cyber-systems. In case when the cyber security of these systems is mainly focused on the assessment of the incidents' probability and prevention of possible security threats, the cyber resilience is mainly aimed at preserving the targeted behavior and cyber systems' performance under the conditions of known (about 45 %) as well as unknown (the remaining 55 %) cyber attacks.This monograph shows that modern Industry 4.0. Cyber systems do not have the required cyber resilience for targeted performance under heterogeneous mass intruder cyber-attacks. The main reasons include a high cyber system structural and functional complexity, a potential danger of existing vulnerabilities and “sleep” hardware and software tabs, as well as an inadequate efficiency of modern models, methods, and tools to ensure cyber security, reliability, response and recovery.