Fergie's Tech Blog

Estonian Attacks Raise Concern Over Cyber 'Nuclear Winter'

Larry Greenemeier writes on InformationWeek:

As NATO technical assistance this week begins to flow into the cyberwar-torn Estonia, additional details are surfacing about the cyberattacks launched during the first two weeks of May against the Baltic nation. Thoughts also are turning to how future attacks might be averted.

The cyberattacks against Estonia, mainly in the form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, primarily targeted the Estonian government, banking, media, and police sites. "Private sector banking and online media were also heavily targeted and the attacks affected the functioning of the rest of the network infrastructure in Estonia," the European Network and Information Security Agency, or ENISA, reported Thursday on its Web site. As a result, the targeted sites were inaccessible outside of Estonia for extended periods in order to subdue the attacks and to maintain services within the country.

DDoS attacks are particularly difficult to prevent and require a lot of coordination to contain the damage when multiple sites are hit. In order to weather the 128 separate strikes launched against its cyber infrastructure, Estonia sought help from not only its own Computer Emergency Readiness Team, established late last year, but also the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (pdf) and CERTs from other countries, including Finland and Germany, according to ENISA.

While cyberattacks against governments are nothing new, the Estonian attacks were particularly damaging, as the country had to shut down key computer systems for their own protection.

posted by Fergie @ 5/24/2007 12:22:00 PM