In 1989, before the internet revolution, Suleyman Anil was the lone man in charge of the security of Nato’s IT system, armed with a single computer.

Two decades later, with the threat of cyber attacks on the rise, Anil oversees two teams tasked with protecting the networks of the alliance’s political headquarters in Brussels and operations command in Mons, Belgium.

The threat is constant, with as many as 100 attempted cyber attacks on Nato every day, but it could take just “one in a day to be dangerous,” said Anil, a Turkish IT expert who heads Nato’s Cyber Defence and Countermeasures Branch.

Nato leaders meeting at a summit in Lisbon last week enshrined cyber security as one of the 28-nation alliance’s priorities when they endorsed a “strategic concept” to guide its strategy for the next decade.

A message seen on a computer in a Nato office makes the threat clear: “Computer viruses pose a risk to our organisation, varying from anonymous to outright dangerous.”

The warning seeks to discourage employees from using USB keys, which can serve as a Trojan horse to plant viruses. But such worms are not the only threat.

The vulnerability of its servers to “professional” and “amateur” hackers was highlighted in 1999 when Serbs flooded Nato with thousands of e-mails to protest the alliance’s bombing campaign in Kosovo, Anil said.

The turning point for Nato came at a summit in Prague in 2002, when leaders asked Nato to improve the security of its computer networks, he told AFP in an interview.

Cyber warfare is one of five sections within a new Nato division against emerging security threats that was created in August.

A costly cyber strike against Estonia in 2007 and the Stuxnet computer worm attack in Iran this year gave new urgency to the need to protect networks.

Following the attack on the Baltic Nato member, the alliance established a research and development centre in Tallin called the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

It also decided to establish a rapid reaction team that would be deployed to help any Nato member following a cyber attack.