NATO to Investigate Estonia-Russia Cyberwar

[mandy]

After three weeks of coordinated cyberattacks on Estonian Web sites, NATO has reportedly sent an official to the country to help investigate.

About 1 million computers worldwide were reportedly used to conduct the denial-of-service attacks on Estonian government and corporate Web sites, swamping them with so much traffic they were forced to shut down. Traffic has finally begun to taper off this week.

The attacks began on April 27, the day the Baltic country removed a Soviet-era war memorial from Tallinn, its capital. Russia has reacted bitterly to the removal, and many have speculated that Moscow was behind the attacks on Estonia...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/NAD0DIE8...ound.xhtml

[mandy]

A related article:

Q: Have there been any previous attacks comparable to the cyberattack situation in Estonia?

Nazario: Compared to larger, higher-profile attacks, it isn't necessarily larger than the rogue DNS (domain name system) server attack this past winter, no larger than the attacks resulting from the Olympics a few years ago with the Apolo Ohno controversy. (In 2002 at the Salt Lake City Games, Ohno won the gold medal in the 1,500-meter speed-skating race after South Korean Kim Dong-Sung was disqualified; soon after, several United States-based servers were hit with a DDoS attack from machines that appeared to be based in South Korea.)

The Estonia attacks certainly are overwhelming and crippling many of those sites in Estonia based upon the resources that they have. But it's the background nature of those attacks that's novel, in comparison to other denial-of-service attacks.

There's no extortion going on. They're not demanding to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Agriculture, "Pay us $50 million, or we keep this up." They're not trying to disrupt e-commerce--they're making a political statement...

full article: http://news.com.com/Cyberattack+in+Eston...l?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news