U.S., Montenegro team on cyberdefense

PODGORICA, Montenegro — Deployed inside the sprawling communist-era army command headquarters in Montenegro’s capital, an elite team of U.S. military cyber experts is plotting strategy in a fight against potential Russian and other cyberattacks ahead of the 2020 American and Montenegrin elections.

With its pristine rocky mountains, lush green forests and deep blue seas, the tiny Balkan state seems an unlikely location for waging global cyber warfare. But after the newest NATO nation was targeted by Russia-linked hackers and a Moscow-backed coup attempt in Montenegro in 2016, the U.S. military has dispatched cyber experts to the Adriatic Sea nation.

Montenegro is in the Balkans, a strategic area where Russia has been seeking to restore its historic influence. The country of just over 600,000 people joined NATO in 2017, defying strong opposition from Moscow. It has proven to be a key Western ally in the volatile region that went through a devastating war in the 1990s.

Montenegrin Defense Minister Predrag Boskovic — careful not to mention Russia — said preventing cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns is key to protecting the Balkans from returning to the chaos of the war years in the 1990s, when tens of thousands of people died during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

“We have seen that the [2016] U.S. election had also faced certain hybrid and cyberattacks,” Boskovic said in an interview. U.S. authorities accuse Russia of using hacking and social media campaigns to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and sow discord among American voters.

“Americans can learn something from us about potential threats for their systems and networks because Montenegro was a real example of an all-out attack before the [2016] election and its NATO accession,” Boskovic said.

One of the malicious software attacks targeted the Montenegrin Defense Ministry with a routine-looking email. It appeared to be from a NATO-member country, but in fact came from hackers.

“Once an employee clicked on the attachment in the email, all of the computers in the network were compromised and they [the hackers] could read all the data that was communicated within the network,” Boskovic said.

Russia’s tactics in undermining the Balkans’ Euro-Atlantic integration includes anti-Western propaganda designed to tarnish the image of European democracies. This, the Kremlin apparently hopes, will slow down the region’s integration into the 28-nation European Union.

Russia’s allies in the Balkans — Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs — have both ruled out joining NATO and boycotted the Western sanctions against Moscow over its policies in Ukraine. Pro-Russian propaganda in those areas depicts the West as the enemy of the Serbs.

Russian activity in the region risks exacerbating ethnic tensions and instability, but the U.S. response has been inconsistent. Trump, a frequent NATO critic, once questioned whether U.S. troops should defend Montenegro as part of the Western military alliance.