Web sites buried in world\'s first cyber-war

E-Brief News reports that Estonia claims that at least 1m computers were used to launch the cyber-attacks and damages had run into the tens of millions of euros. Despite initial claims that Russia was behind the offensive, Estonian Government officials have refused to accuse the Kremlin directly. If it is established that Russia was behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another with cyber-warfare. Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union over the Estonians\' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn. The Guardian reports that the country has subsequently been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the Web sites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where Web sites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their Internet addresses – many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions. The New York Times reports that Madis Mikko, a spokesperson for the Estonian Defence Ministry, said sites that typically received 1 000 visits a day had been buried under as many as 2 000 a second. As the attacks have continued, they are now being traced to computers around the world, from Vietnam to the US, according to Hillar Aarelaid, the head of the country’s newly-created Computer Emergency Response Team. Aarelaid said attacks involved \'botnets,\' networks of computers that have been compromised by an unauthorised user, who can then command and control them. Instructions in Russian on how to attack Estonian sites have circulated on the Internet, he added, suggesting that the world’s first cyber-war would continue. Full report in The Guardian Full report in The New York Times

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences. \'This is an operational security issue, something we\'re taking very seriously,\' said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. \'It goes to the heart of the alliance\'s modus operandi.\' Estonian officials say that one of the masterminds of the cyber-campaign, identified from his online name, is connected to the Russian security service. The Guardian says that a 19-year-old was arrested in Tallinn at the weekend for his alleged involvement. Expert opinion is divided on whether the identity of the cyber-warriors can be ascertained properly. Experts from Nato member states and from the alliance\'s NCSA unit – \'Nato\'s first line of defence against cyber-terrorism\' – were meeting in Seattle when the crisis erupted. A couple of them were rushed to Tallinn. Mikko Hyppoenen, a Finnish expert, said it would be difficult to prove the Russian state\'s responsibility, and that the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, cyber attacks are such a new phenomenon that there are no universal rules available on how to strike back at them. ‘We haven\'t yet defined what can be considered to be a cyber-attack, or what are the rights of member states and the obligations of EU and Nato in the event such attacks are launched,’ Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said. ‘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 said. Full report in The Guardian Full report in The Sydney Morning Herald