NATO to declare war in response to cyber attacks

One of the outcomes of NATO summit of 15 June 2021 is an updated definition of the attacks capable of triggering article 5 of the treaty, justifying a military response by the whole alliance.

The new threats include cyber attacks, from art 32:

We reaffirm that a decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis.

While this conclusion seems to be reasonable in general terms, it unfortunately implies a risk.

Cyber attacks are quite impossible to explain and demonstrate to the general public, unless exposing even more sensible information about, for example, digital defence systems. They can be carried out wherever in the world, and traces can easily be deleted or fabricated, especially by whoever casually happens to own most of the world’s communication infrastructure at the moment.

False flag operations, a classic of the last 30 years, are much simpler to organize in the cyberspace, out of the scrutiny of the public opinion. Any nation, or organization, can be proven responsible of any kind of attack the owner of the network will decide to fake.

My fear is that the most powerful NATO members might be even more tempted to involve the whole alliance in wars based on false facts, fake news and venomous phials of all sorts.