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Source: Europol
Catherine De Bolle, Executive Director of Europol, said:In today’s changing world, terrorist actors are continuously adapting their narratives, outreach and activities in response to the most recent geopolitical and socioeconomic developments. The targeting of young people and their involvement by terrorist groups, including their active role in the production of online propaganda and the planning of attacks, is an increasing…
Source: NATO
Experts from Allied countries, think-tanks, academia and international organisations gathered at NATO Headquarters (on 9 December 2024), for the annual roundtable on energy security hosted by NATO. They shared views on recent energy developments, including the changing critical infrastructure landscape, and their implications for our collective security. They also discussed the energy transition and the use of innovative energy technologies and sources for the military, as part of NATO’s Energy Transition by Design. This initiative aims to strengthen coordination amongst Allies, as they continue to adapt their armed forces and further improve their effectiveness.
Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber, James Appathurai said: “We need to double down on our innovation efforts. Advanced batteries, hydrogen fuel cells and other innovations are enablers of key military capabilities. They can directly translate into enhanced battlefield performance and provide NATO with a technological edge against potential adversaries.”
The event included speakers from the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, NATO’s Energy Security Centre of Excellence, the US Department of Defense, the University of Bonn, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, the Centre for Global Studies Strategy XXI, and industry representatives from WindEurope, HIF Global, Alba Emission Free Energy, and Rystad Energy.
Source: NATO
On Wednesday (11 December 2024), NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) announced a new cohort of innovative companies that will join its accelerator programme in January 2025.
These companies are developing deep technology solutions to respond to pressing security challenges related to energy & power, sensing & surveillance, data & information security, human health & performance, and critical infrastructure & logistics.
As part of the programme, the companies will each receive €100,000 in funding, training in technology, commercial development and defence, and opportunities to test their solutions in a variety of specialised environments.
“We are proud to welcome the newest cohort of innovators into DIANA,” said Professor Deeph Chana, Managing Director of DIANA. “Over the coming months, these creative, highly skilled companies will accelerate the development of their dual-use technologies as they work to solve a suite of complex, interconnected defence, security and resilience challenges.”
“The 2025 innovators form a truly impressive cohort combining deep technological expertise and creative problem-solving,” said Chief Scientist Tien Pham. “We look forward to supporting the technical development of these innovators, while connecting them to DIANA’s network of mentors, test centres and end users as they grow their companies and apply their ideas to Allied needs.”
Over 70 companies, headquartered across 20 NATO countries, were selected through a competitive process from more than 2,600 submissions to DIANA’s Challenge call earlier in 2024. They specialise in a range of technological fields from quantum sensing to propulsion technology and biomedical equipment.
Further information is available on LinkedIn and on the DIANA website: DIANA
The complete list of companies can be found here: DIANA | 2025 Cohort of Companies
Source: US Defense Joint Chiefs of Staff
December 11, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Joint Staff Spokesperson Navy Capt. Jereal Dorsey provided the following readout:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., spoke with Chief of the Turkish General Staff Gen. Metin Gürak yesterday by phone.
The two military leaders discussed the evolving security situation in Syria, our commitment to defense cooperation, and efforts to promote peace and stability. Both leaders agreed on the necessity of communication and partner cooperation to ensure peaceful transition in Syria.
Turkey is a key NATO ally, and the U.S. values its strategic bilateral relationship.
For more Joint Staff news, visit: www.jcs.mil.
Connect with the Joint Staff on social media:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube,
LinkedIn and Flickr.
Source: NATO
On Thursday, 12 December 2024, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte will deliver a speech followed by a conversation moderated by Dr. Rosa Balfour, Director of Carnegie Europe.
The event, hosted by Carnegie Europe in cooperation with NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, will take place at Concert Noble, Brussels.
Media advisory
15:00 (CET) “To Prevent War, NATO Must Spend More”: a Conversation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte
Media coverage
For more information:
Contact the NATO Press Office
For more information about the event, please contact Mr Mattia Bagherini at Mattia.Bagherini@ceip.org or access Carnegie Europe’s event webpage.
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Source: Europol
Known as ‘booter’ and ‘stresser’ websites, these platforms enabled cybercriminals and hacktivists to flood targets with illegal traffic, rendering websites and other web-based services inaccessible.This multifaceted operation, coordinated by Europol and involving 15 countries, targeted all levels of those engaged in this crime. Three administrators behind these illicit platforms were arrested, and several actions were taken against numerous users of…
Source: National Security Agency NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) Research Directorate recently selected “Decoding Trust: Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models,” as the winner of its 12th Annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition.
The winning paper, authored by 19 researchers including professors Dawn Song, University of California at Berkeley; Bo Li, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Sanmi Koyejo, Stanford University, evaluated the framework for large language models (LLMs) and proposed a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for them, with a focus on generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models.
“The value of this paper to the foundational research community is the proposed evaluation framework for large language models,” said Dr. Adam Tagert, Technical Director of NSA’s Science of Security program. “This framework is a noteworthy foundational advancement in that other people can use it to rigorously evaluate future LLMs and scientifically compare them. It is essentially providing much needed metrics in this community.”
NSA’s Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research established the competition in 2013 to encourage the development of scientific foundations in cybersecurity, and to support enhancement of cybersecurity within devices, computers, and systems through rigorous research, solid scientific methodology, documentation, and publishing.
NSA’s Research Director Gil Herrera, along with NSA cybersecurity experts and external authorities in the field, selected this year’s winning entry from 42 papers nominated by the public.
The winning researchers considered diverse perspectives in their evaluation, including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness.
They discovered previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats, such as that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in training data and conversation history. The paper uncovers vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats and sheds light on trustworthiness gaps.
“This paper has high impact,” Tagert said. “A generative AI company has already adopted its research results and created a leaderboard on the framework.”
According to Tagert, because of the high quality of papers nominated this year, two were selected for honorable mentions.
The first went to “Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversations,” by professors Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington; Yasemin Acar, Paderborn University (Germany)/Georgetown; and Wulf Loh, University of Tübingen (Germany).
The second honorable mention was awarded for “SoK: I Have the (Developer) Power! Sample Size Estimation for Fisher’s Exact, Chi-Squared, McNemar’s, Wilcoxon Rank-Sum, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank and t-Tests in Developer-Centered Usable Security,” by PhD student Anna-Marie Ortloff, researcher Christian Tiefenau, and professor Matthew Smith, all of the University of Bonn in Germany.
Nominations for the 13th annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition open on 15 January. NSA welcomes nominations of papers published in 2024 in peer-reviewed journals and technical conferences that show an outstanding contribution to cybersecurity science. Winners will be announced at the end of 2025.
Visit the Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition webpage for more information on the competition and to nominate a paper.
Source: NATO
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte welcomed the President of the Republic of Moldova Maia Sandu to NATO Headquarters today (10 December 2024). President Sandu addressed Allied Ambassadors in a meeting of the North Atlantic Council.
Secretary General Rutte praised the Moldovan President for her country’s resilience against unprecedented Russian interference and other significant challenges including political pressure, disinformation and hybrid threats. He thanked Ms Sandu for her staunch leadership in helping to uphold the rules-based international order following Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. He also welcomed Moldova’s continued valuable contributions to international security, including by deploying troops to the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo (KFOR).
This year NATO and Moldova marked 30 years of partnership. Both the political dialogue and practical cooperation that underpin NATO-Moldova relations have grown significantly in recent years. Through an enhanced defence capacity building package, NATO and Allies continue to help Moldova strengthen its resilience, counter disinformation and respond to cyber-attacks, supporting its path towards its European integration.
Source: NATO
Military and civilian experts from across NATO met at NATO Headquarters on Tuesday (10 December 2024) to ramp up further cooperation to counter threats to critical undersea infrastructure.
They were joined by industry representatives, including telecommunications operators. Participants at the meeting reviewed mechanisms to boost situational awareness, to enhance information sharing and preparedness, and to deter and defend against attacks to undersea infrastructure.
“Leveraging innovation and technology, including through increased sensing and monitoring to detect suspicious activity near critical undersea infrastructure, is a key focus,” said Ambassador Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber. “This is not a new problem set for NATO, but it is one that requires even closer cooperation between civilian and military actors in the face of intensifying hostile campaigns, including by Russia.”
In May, NATO launched a new Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure within the Alliance’s Maritime Command in the United Kingdom. With growing threats to subsea infrastructure, NATO created earlier this year a Critical Undersea Network to improve information sharing and coordination for the security of undersea cables and pipelines. The Network brings together stakeholders from Allies’ governments, industries, NATO’s civilian and military headquarters as well as other relevant actors.
Source: NATO
Viveca Norman, born in 1961 in Sweden, was appointed by the North Atlantic Council as Board Member of the International Board of Auditors for NATO (IBAN) for four years as of 1 December 2024.
She holds a Master of Business and Economics from Uppsala University. She spent an additional year studying trade law.
After her studies, she worked on financial audit in the private sector at the Stockholm offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC. She spent two years working at the IT audit department and during her last seven years at the firm, she served as a certified public accountant with a focus on auditing large enterprises.
Subsequently, she joined the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), focusing on different regulatory measures in the market for electronic communication. At PTS, she served in various managerial positions and as a project manager of major development projects. During her time at PTS, she was appointed as Sweden’s permanent representative to the Communications Committee, an advisory body under the European Commission with responsibility for various regulatory issues.
Since 2007, she has been employed at the Swedish National Audit Office. She has held various positions within the Financial Audit Department, including Head of Unit, Head of Technical Support, and project leader. She also served as a long-term advisor in a development project in Tanzania for three years with the objectives of implementing international auditing standards and rolling out audit software to all public sector auditors in the country. In 2018, she was appointed Head of the Financial Audit Department, which includes overall responsibility for the financial audit of all central government agencies in Sweden. In this role, she has been a member of the top management group at the Swedish National Audit Office.
She has represented the Swedish National Audit Office as a member of INTOSAI’s working group Financial Audit and Accounting Subcommittee (FAAS) since 2018. In 2024, before joining IBAN, she was Vice-chair of FAAS.