Europe’s Most Wired Country Under Hacker Attack
Posted by John Malloy on 08/09/2010
CALL IT THE FIRST BATTLE in a new era of cyber-warfare. Earlier this year, the entire country of Estonia was hit with a paralyzing attack on its Internet infrastructure that shut down the websites of government ministries, news organizations and major banks.
The tiny Baltic nation was hammered by a massive wave of what are called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In a DDoS attack, hackers use “botnets” – networks of surreptitiously commandeered “zombie” computers – to bombard a target website with bogus requests for information, overwhelming the host computer and forcing the site to shut down. Such attacks hit commercial websites all the time, and have been used for political ends before – but never on such a scale. Estonia is a particularly vulnerable target: It's the most wired country in Europe, one where citizens can do everything from paying parking tickets to voting for Parliament via the Internet.
Who was behind this digital siege? No one knows for sure, but a whole lot of evidence points to Russian nationalists furious at the Estonian government's plans to remove a Soviet war memorial from its honored place in Tallinn, the capital city. They may have been helped by Russian Internet security firms looking to make a point about the need for their services – and maybe even by the Russian government itself.
via Wired Science . World War 2.0 | PBS.
Posted by
John Malloy
on 08/09/2010. Filed under
International.
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