Cyberwar I: What the attacks on Estonia have taught us about online combat.
By Cyrus Farivar
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007, at 12:14 PM ETIn Estonia, you can pay for your parking meter via cell phone, access free Wi-Fi at every gas station, and, as of two months ago, vote in national elections from your PC. The small, wired country can now add another item to this list of technological achievements: It’s the first government to get targeted for large-scale cyberwarfare.
Since late April, the Web sites of various Estonian government entities, banks, and media outlets have been barraged with extraordinary amounts of Web traffic (100 times more than usual), making them very slow and even unusable. The Estonian government has identified as-yet-unknown rogue Russian hackers and the Kremlin as participants in these denial-of-service attacks. Russia has firmly denied these charges.
After the attacks, officials from NATO and the European Union converged on Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, to analyze what had transpired. All the Estonians can point to as tangible evidence of these attacks are gigabytes of server logs. Most of the targeted Web sites, which for a brief time were accessible only to traffic from within Estonia, are now accessible to the vast majority of the world’s Internet users once again. It’s almost as if nothing ever happened. (Indeed, Estonian newspaper Postimees reported that 49.48 percent of those surveyed were not at all affected by the attacks.)
