The trouble between the Estonian government and Estonia’s ethnic Russians has taken a new dimension in the online world.
Cyber-warfare on an unprecedented scale has hammered Estonian web sites for the last two weeks in the aftermath of the government’s controversial decision to relocate a Soviet-era war monument from the center of Tallinn to the suburbs. Two days of rioting by ethnic Russians, who saw this as an attack on their heritage and on minority rights, quickly transitioned from the real to the virtual world, as government web sites came under DDoS attacks so severe that many agencies shut off access to IP addresses outside Estonia for several days.
Since it seems clear that the attacks come from Russia (some attacks coming allegedly from Russia’s president Putin office), Estonia is raising the issue with NATO. After all, when a NATO-member finds itself under attack, it is the function of NATO to get involved, considering the whole alliance under attack.
According to The Guardian, “NATO has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences“.
Updated (May-18): The Arbor Networks blog (”Security to the Core”) has some information about the targets of the attacks and other quantitative data.
0 Responses to “Massive DoS attacks on Estonia”
Leave a Reply