The attacks on Estonia

This post is to summarize the attacks last month on the digitaly interconnected parts of one of Sweden's neighboring country, Estonia.

The network attacks, different types of DoS and DDoS attacks, have spurred a flood of articles on newspapers and magazines. The attacks against Estonian Web sites started after the April 27 removal of a statue known as the Bronze Soldier, an old Soviet monument. The attacks have been seen to and from for close to a month.

Infoworld had an article on the subject of picking someone your own size In Washington Post they quote the Estonian defence minister saying: "We identified in the initial attacks IP numbers from the Russian governmental offices". If its true, that assault, and the way it was initially executed, is really bad politics.

There have been several longer articles on the recent events. The well known magazine The Economist pointed out in an article titled Newly nasty with subheading Defences against cyberwarfare are still rudimentary that:

For the first time, a state faced a frontal, anonymous attack that swamped the websites of banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters; that hobbled Estonia's efforts to make its case abroad.

Many accusations are pointing to Russia, but it is not very much (yet) in the news to give any clear indication on who, what or where the attacks are ultimately directed from. The head of the Estonian CERT, Hillar Aarelaid, made an estonian government web. Even the Estonian defense minister made some strong comments, according to the article Estonia urges firm EU, NATO response to new form of warfare: cyber-attacks in The Sydney Morning Herald:

"The EU and NATO need to work out a common legal basis to deal with cyber attacks. For example, we have to agree on how to tackle different levels of criminal cyber-activities, depending on whether what we are dealing with is vandalism, cyber-terror or cyber-war," he [Hillar Aarelaid, head of CERT-EE] said.

The ariticle also notes that the NATO defence ministers will discuss cyber defence at a meeting in Brussels in June. It might be both good and bad to have the big players starting to have an interest in this area. Probably mostly bad since the questions will get out of hands of skilled people and into the hands of politicians.

On the positive side, there are two good articles on the subject from two Internet Guru's. Kurt-Erik "kurtis" Lindqvist has a very good writeup on the whole situation Real lessons learned from the attacks on Estonia. Patrik "paf" Fältstrom have a shorter, but more graphical overview of the situation. These statements can certainly show how much media manage to twist a media covered story to change from the original story.