begin quote from:
NATO-Linked Websites Go Down, Cyberattack Suspected
| Wall Street Journal | - |
Officials
are trying to determine whether a cyberattack was behind outages at
websites affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
whether hackers were attempting to counter a Warsaw summit that is
addressing both cyberspace dangers and ...
NATO-Linked Websites Go Down, Cyberattack Suspected
North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Warsaw to address cyberspace dangers and Russian aggression
ENLARGE
From left, NATO
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Lithuanian President Dalia
Grybauskaite, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Afghan Chief Executive
Officer Abdullah Abdullah, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis
watched NATO military aircraft fly past during the summit in Warsaw
Friday.
Photo:
Getty Images
Officials said there is no concrete evidence the websites were knocked out by hacking. But some officials suspect that Russian-backed hackers could be responsible for the website outage that took down a pair of websites affiliated with NATO’s Allied Transformation Command based in Norfolk, Va.
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“This is a suspicious timing for a technical failure,” said a senior alliance official. “If this is a cyberattack, it would be no surprise.”
NATO on Friday officially approved cyberspace as a so-called war fighting domain, as are land, air and sea. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the move would improve alliance planning and exercises aimed at defending against cyberattacks. Alliance members on Friday also pledged to strengthen their own cyberdefenses and share more information about how to prevent and block cyberattacks.
“This is a clear sign we are strengthening our collective defense,” Mr. Stoltenberg said.
A U.S. official said Russian-based hackers are constantly trying to hit NATO and American military internet sites in Europe as well as contractors that work with the alliance and U.S.
“They are trying on a daily basis, they are looking at the weakest point,” the official said.
On Friday, the main site of Allied Transformation Command and the site of a NATO school in Oberammergau, Germany, went down, though the former went back online in the evening. Web traffic to those sites was redirected to the main NATO website.
In March 2014, after the alliance condemned Russian intervention in Ukraine, cyber attackers brought down the main NATO website for about 12 hours. The alliance, officials said, strengthened the defenses and subsequently has been able to withstand much stronger cyberattack efforts.
Alliance officials say so far they do not know of any data breaches that have resulted from cyberattacks on alliance nations.
While attributing cyberattacks is difficult, about 80% of cyberattacks on NATO websites are conducted by a nation-state or hackers supported by a nation-state. The other 20% are the work of criminal experts, the alliance estimates.
—Thomas Grove contributed to this article.
Write to Julian E. Barnes at julian.barnes@wsj.com 
