Today October 4th, the European Union and NATO staffs held the first Structured Dialogue on Cyber. Building on the previous EU-NATO High-Level Staff Talks on Cyber Security and Defence (link), the dialogue aimed to consolidate EU-NATO cooperation on cybersecurity and cyber defence and provided new opportunities for enhancing cooperation in the future.

While EU and NATO continue to face growing and complex threats and geopolitical challenges, the organisations discussed how to further increase their coordination, including on recent initiatives that aim to enhance their ability to detect, deter and defend against cyber-attacks.

During the dialogue, EU and NATO officials took stock of recent developments, and identified new opportunities for cooperation in the areas of enhancing cyber resilience and protection of critical infrastructure and effective cyber crisis management. They as well explored how to further advance the alignment of their respective cyber defence frameworks and instruments to respond to malicious cyber activities.

The Structured Dialogue also included a scenario-based discussion using a specific fictitious cyber scenario. The discussion provided the opportunity to enhance understanding on the respective response and crisis coordination frameworks and enabled to identify concrete actions for cooperation.

The EU and NATO staff reaffirmed their commitment to continue working together on enhancing shared situational awareness, cyber capacity building and preventing, deterring and responding to cyber threats. The next meeting will be held in 2025.

This is the seventh ‘Structured Dialogue’ established between the EU and NATO in the framework of the implementation of the three Joint Declarations of 2016, 2018 and 2021 on EU-NATO cooperation.EU-NATO have other Structured Dialogues on Military Mobility, Resilience, Emerging and disruptive technologies, Climate and defence, Space and Defence Industry.