Cyberattacks shut down Estonia
Submitted by jrjacobs on Sat, 2007-06-02 20:47.
I've been following this fascinating story for a few weeks now. It started when Estonian authorities began removing a bronze statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from a park in Tallinn, Estonia. The removal sparked violent protests from Estonians of Russian descent as was to be expected. What was unexpected was what the NY Times -- in the article entitled, "Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in Estonia" -- and others have called the "first war in cyberspace." The country was beseiged by a flood of distributed denial-of-service attacks on the country's digital infrastructure, "clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers." The cyber-attacks went on for several weeks.
The story was also slashdotted.
The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.
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CyberWar
Cyberwar has been a hot topic the past month.
Human beings depend on information for survival and communications systems that are increasingly linked to computers and electronic transmissions. The technology that adds value to our lives also leaves us vulnerable to attacks, and to Information Warfare. Even Spam, or unsolicited email, that slows down computers and creates extra work, is a form of Information Warfare. News archives contain countless reports and examples of information being used as both a weapon and a target, from cell phone jamming to denial of service.
Know Your Enemy: Information Warfare Resources
Information Warfare and Information Security on the Web>
Maintained by the Federation of American Scientists.
Information Warfare Monitor
The Information Warfare Monitor is maintained by the Advanced Network Research Group, University of Cambridge, and the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. Stay informed about the situations in Estonia, China, and the Middle East.
Dorothy Denning's Links
Dr. Dorothy E. Denning, author of Information warfare and security (New York: ACM Press ; Reading, Ma. : Addison-Wesley, c1999) is Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and Director of the Georgetown Institute for Information Assurance.
it can go both ways
thanks for the cites Deb. This "information warfare" is sometimes done as a form of non-violent protest. For example, a couple of years ago, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) did a distributed denial of service attack on the Minutemen website (http://www.swarmtheminutemen.com/ is no longer active, but you can look it up in the wayback machine!). Interestingly, Denning gave testimony before the Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism Committee on Armed Services in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 23, 2000 regarding EDT and made an important distinction between cyber-terrorism and civil disobedience.
I'm intrigued by the possibilities for "reverse surveillance" (for lack of a better word :-) ) where grassroots organizations can better track groups like the Minutemen, political "leaders" like Randy "Duke" Cunningham and William Jefferson etc.
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