For the first time, NATO wargames include scenarios exploring the impact of widespread cyberattacks on financial infrastructure
Financial industry helped plan scenarios in which widespread disruption would hit banks and other firms — One of the world's largest cyber wargames is … Tweets: @natesibley Tweets: Nate Sibley / @natesibley : NATO's cyber wargames are, for the first time, exploring how financial institutions might respond to widespread conflict. Great to see the financial dimension of security entering NATO mindset. Nothing is off the table for its kleptocratic adversaries. https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
NATO has been running cyber defense exercises for years — its Locked Shields exercise, detailed in prior coverage with 19 teams defending national infrastructure, is the world's largest. What is new here is scope: the alliance is now gaming attacks aimed at money itself, with banks and other financial firms helping design the scenarios. The precedent runs back to 2015, when the UK and US staged cyber attack war games involving commercial banks to test critical national infrastructure — NATO folding finance into its own wargaming extends that bilateral practice to the alliance level. The threat model is not hypothetical either: earlier reporting tied attacks on the Polish stock exchange and a German steel plant to Russia's hacking campaign against the US and NATO.
First-order effects
- Banks and financial firms move from advisory bystanders to active participants in NATO planning, gaining direct insight into how the alliance models disruption to payments and market infrastructure.
- Locked Shields' traditional focus — defending national infrastructure networks per the prior exercise write-ups — formally widens to include financial-sector targets, changing which players show up at the next iteration.
Second-order effects
- Financial institutions face pressure to align their own resilience exercises with NATO's scenario assumptions, since a mismatch between what banks rehearse and what the alliance gamed becomes an audit finding.
- Other governments that ran bank-inclusive exercises bilaterally — as the UK and US did — face a template they can adopt wholesale, shifting wargame participation from intelligence agencies toward central banks and market operators.
Third-order effects
- If finance becomes a standard wargame domain, cross-border crisis response stops being improvised: pre-agreed playbooks between alliances and banking systems become part of defense planning, much as the broader digital arms race described in earlier coverage pushed states from ad hoc capability-building to doctrine.
The trend: Cyber conflict is moving from network defense into systemic economic targets, with NATO's inclusion of financial-infrastructure scenarios marking the shift from defending computers to defending the plumbing of markets.