I had been peripherally aware about Russia's dissatisfaction that the Baltic state of Estonia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, decided to relocate the statue of the Bronze Soldier--which commemorates the Soviets retaking Tallinn from the Germans in 1944. It currently calls a military cemetery home as shown in the picture. Quite a number of Estonians saw it as a symbol of Soviet occupation, and were keen on having it relocated. However, the Russian-speaking community in Estonia and a group of war veterans have taken umbrage to this act. Riots have occurred in Estonia. More importantly for this story, Russia has not taken very well to this relocation project.While scanning our copy of The Guardian at the office, I came across this fascinating article that describes the "cyberwar" Russia is allegedly waging against Estonia as a response to the Bronze Soldier relocation. NATO has been called in by Estonia to assess this new security challenge. (Is it now clear why Estonia was set on joining NATO?) It seems Russia is still keen on seeing itself as the overlord of former parts of the Soviet Union, whether it be over energy quarrels, multicolored revolutions, or statues being relocated. Ah, but for the glory that was the Soviet Union (at least if you ask Putin):
A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.10/19 Update: The Washington Post adds more details, especially on the technical side. This case is indeed an example of evolving warfare: Nowadays, not only do you have to defend your land and airspace, but also your cyberspace it seems:
While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.
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..."
"At present, Nato does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words collective self-defence, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country," said the Estonian defence minister, Jaak Aaviksoo."Not a single Nato defence minister would define a cyber-attack as a clear military action at present. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future..."
The [denial of service] 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 cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week. It was still unavailable last night.
By April 30, Aarelaid said, security experts noticed an increasing level of sophistication. Government Web sites and new targets, including media Web sites, came under attack from electronic cudgels known as botnets. Bots are computers that can be remotely commanded to participate in an attack. They can be business or home computers, and are known as zombie computers.
When bots were turned loose on Estonia, Aaviksoo said, roughly 1 million unwitting computers worldwide were employed. Officials said they traced bots to countries as dissimilar as the United States, China, Vietnam, Egypt and Peru.
By May 1, Estonian Internet service providers had come under sustained attack. System administrators were forced to disconnect all customers for 20 seconds to reboot their networks...
On May 9, the day Russia celebrates victory in World War II, a new wave of attacks began at midnight Moscow time.
"It was the Big Bang," Aarelaid said. By his account, 4 million packets of data per second, every second for 24 hours, bombarded a host of targets that day...
"The nature of the latest attacks is very different," said Linnar Viik, a government [of Estonia] IT consultant, "and it's no longer a bunch of zombie computers, but things you can't buy from the black market," he said. "This is something that will be very deeply analyzed, because it's a new level of risk. In the 21st century, the understanding of a state is no longer only its territory and its airspace, but it's also its electronic infrastructure.
"This is not some virtual world," Viik added. "This is part of our independence. And these attacks were an attempt to take one country back to the cave, back to the Stone Age."
