Norway’s National Security Authority (NSM) raised its national cyber-risk rating to high on Tuesday, Oct. 27, after reporting a threefold rise in successful cyber operations and urging exposed organizations to act immediately.
NSM Director Arne Christian Haugstøyl said the agency had recorded the increase over six months. NSM did not identify who was behind it.
The agency’s five-level scale runs from very low to extremely high. High is the second-highest rating; moderate is the normal level, when cyber operations against Norwegian organizations are expected. NSM said this was the first time it had made the national rating public in an unclassified form.
NSM identified the defense sector, defense industry, space sector, critical infrastructure and service providers to organizations important to national security as facing high risk. It said threats include reconnaissance, attempted and successful compromises, ransomware and denial-of-service attacks.
The authority urged organizations to review phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, system hardening, security logging and detection. It also recommended keeping software and device inventories, managing supply-chain risks and checking that safeguards work. NSM said stronger baseline security at organizations could lower the national risk level.
NSM warned that language models and agentic artificial intelligence systems could pose serious risks when used in cyber operations, but said such use had not been documented in Norway.
Separately, Norway’s Police Security Service (PST) said its 2026 threat assessment expects cyber operations by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, directly or through proxy actors, to continue this year. The assessment did not attribute NSM’s reported increase to those countries.
