When cybersecurity equals national security

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Category: Opinion

Summary

Hybrid warfare isn’t theory anymore. It’s reality.

In the Nordics, GPS jamming, drone fly-bys, and fake-news blitzes are testing how nations hold their nerve. War looks different now. It starts online, long before anyone fires a shot.

That’s why the NATO Summit in the Hague this year mattered. It wasn’t just diplomats in suits. It was 6,00 delegates from 32 nations walking straight into a live-fire exercise for the digital age.

Behind the scenes, Operation Orange Shield mobilized 27,000 police and 10,000 military to lock down streets, skies, and servers.

Every camera, every router, every login mattered. Because if you can’t protect your network, you can’t protect your nation.

The digital battlefield

The Dutch NCSC called it early. Cyber risk doesn’t stay in one lane. It spills into logistics, media, utilities, and local government. Every supplier, every device, every inbox is a door.

The Summit’s live-fire stress test soon became reality: pro-Russian groups launched waves of DDoS attacks at Dutch municipalities. Services held, but just barely.

Lesson learned: visibility and triage determine whether a nuisance becomes a crisis.

Get your digital fundamentals right

Most intrusions still exploit the simple stuff: unpatched systems, stale credentials, human error. That’s why the NCSC and the Digital Trust Center issued five universal principles for Dutch organizations:

  • Map your risks
  • Promote safe behavior
  • Patch and harden
  • Control access
  • Prepare for incidents

These principles turn guidance into day-to-day practice.

Even the best controls collapse if people under pressure act on instinct instead of verification. The NATO Summit, as well as recent tensions around hybrid warfare, show that designing for human behavior is mission-critical. The secure path must be the easiest path.

Risky actions should trigger checks, holds, or second approvals. Security must feel natural, not forced.

Turning lessons into action

Cybersecurity Awareness Month isn’t about posters. It’s about muscle memory.

  • Assign clear owners for verification of unusual requests and for outbound communications, especially during high-attention periods.
  • Rehearse the first hour of an incident with your key suppliers so handoffs are clean.
  • Standardize your security notices so staff can recognize real messages at a glance, which blunts disinformation.
  • Set secure defaults, require a short hold or a second person for high-risk approvals, and use phish-resistant authentication.

And above all: make responsibility explicit. Pause before you share. Verify through a second channel. Escalate when something feels wrong.

The bottom line

Technology scales your defenses. People decide whether they hold. The NATO Summit was a reminder that national security now depends on digital resilience, and digital resilience depends on human design.

Ready to put your incident response to the test?

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