"We are already in the middle of a cyber war” - NATO expert warns

Cyber attacks, in the millions, seem to be part of the daily digital landscape, but they remain invisible to the public eye. Andrea Rigoni, senior fellow of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, warns that humanity is already experiencing a permanent digital conflict - a war that is being waged without explosions, but with potentially devastating consequences. The statements were made at the Bucharest Cyber Security Conference (BCC2025), an event organized by the National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC), with the support of the National Coordination Center of Romania (NCC-RO) and the National Association for Information Systems Security (ANSSI).

• The Invisible War in Digital Space

"In cyberspace, we are in a continuous war. I'm not saying it, NATO officials are saying it,” Rigoni said. According to the expert, the lack of direct perception of digital threats means that the danger is often ignored or underestimated. "You don't see the enemy coming. We're talking about millions, even billions of cyberattacks, but we don't see them. We only see numbers. It's a matter of perception. In digital space, your senses are not trained to understand the danger, and the image you have is just an analog version of reality,” explained the Atlantic Council representative. To illustrate this idea, Rigoni made a comparison between drones that close airports and computer viruses that paralyze critical infrastructure without the public noticing: "Have you ever heard of an airport being closed due to a digital attack? And yet, the consequences can be worse than in the case of a drone.”

• Companies - "soldiers in the trenches” of digital warfare

According to the expert, companies and institutions that operate online are the first lines of defense in a permanent conflict. "The way we approach cybersecurity is as if companies were in the trenches. Yes, they receive weapons - that is, sensors, software, information from governments and technology providers - but most of the effort falls on their shoulders. Cyberspace is fragmented into millions of trenches,” Rigoni stressed. This fragmentation makes it difficult to coordinate responses and, above all, to clearly identify aggressors: "In physical space, you can send a tank. In cyberspace, you can't intervene directly.” Rigoni was skeptical about the idea of building huge "cyber armies,” believing that the solution lies not in militarizing the digital space, but in increasing resilience. "You may or may not agree that cyberspace is a battlefield, but you can't send soldiers to a power plant to defend IT systems. They don't have the tools or the understanding. We need to invest much more in resilience - here Europe has an important role, but also clear limitations,” said the expert. He also mentioned NATO's recent classification, which considers cyberspace as the fourth domain of conflict, alongside land, sea and air, now completed by outer space.

• Resilience, the key to digital defense

The central message conveyed by Andrea Rigoni is that resilience - the ability to withstand and recover quickly from an attack - must become the number one priority. "In the digital domain, offensive operations do not work as we think. It is more efficient to build resilient systems than to try to respond to attacks. Europe is making progress, but we need to accelerate investment and education in this regard,” concluded the expert.