DoS Attacks on Estonia Were Launched by Student 184
As_I_Please alerts us to the fact that a 20-year-old Estonian student has been fined for participating in DoS attacks against various Estonian political and governmental websites last May. The situation was notable because it escalated tensions between Estonia and Russia when the latter was accused of initiating the 'cyber-attack'. Quoting:
"The fact that a single student was able to trigger such events is particularly ominous when you consider just how many potential flashpoints exist between various countries all over the world. The DoS attack against Estonia is an excellent example of how a cyberattack carried out by a 20-year-old student in response to real-life events further exacerbated an existing problem between two nations."
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Informative)
Say what you want. Thats where it all started.
Re:Obligatory Soviet Russia Jokes Thread (Score:2, Informative)
In Russia you always fight people that are not in your weight category.
In Russia you are the bully.
Estonia is not fighting Soviet Russia. It is fighting imperial ambitions of Russian Federation. These ambitions are continuously fueled in Russian media. How many jokes Russians have about conflicts with Georgia or Estonia? If you know Russian, find Zadornov new year's show for 2008. Russians occupied independent countries for more than half of century and expect people of those countries to like them.
Re:Not Acting Alone (Score:3, Informative)
Would you mind sharing with us the 'botnet' protocol?
I realize there is no botnet protocol, but actually hundreds (or thousands) of them, each different, for one type of botnet drone software. These also change, in that new ones are introduced, and old ones updated. I realize that, and hope you see it now too.
What exact type of traffic are you claiming can be detected?
The 10 or 20 packets sent once that went towards the DoS attack? You realize you made more http requests than that just to load the main slashdot page?
A few packets that look like any other coming from one machine, that after added with the traffic from the other millions of drones becomes signifigant.. I still fail to see how you claim these are detectable?
Concidering the only traffic a drone has to make can be hidden with the real network traffic of that computer, so that it is not possible to tell the difference between it and the computer users own actions.
There might be certain patterns right now that are detectable, but any of them would be trivial to hide if that was the botnet admins desire (which seems a logical one to assume, as a detected infection is less useful than an undetected one)
I'd be willing to bet that most likely your PC right now performs actions over the network that will make it appear to be part of a botnet. Checking a server at regular times (system and app updates) over an SSL connection, check. Sends out a few http requests now and then, check.
Yup, detection shows your a drone.
Re:Russia accused... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
'Everybody'? I don't know what planet you where on back then, but most people in Europe didn't buy the theory of a link to Al-Qaeda. Most governments of Europe also wanted the weapons inspections to continue instead of invading.
Personally, I expected an invasion to become the quagmire the current Vice President of USA predicted. And I, along with a lot of people, expected it to only enrich certain oil companies. I even participated in a protest march for this.
M.
Re:Russia accused... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Probably not. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Informative)
I have a read an explanation over at The Strategy Page [strategypage.com]. For him, it was a bluffing to win at two fronts. Iraq and everything west of it is Arab, at the east you have Iran. Arabs live in fear of the Persians. This dates back more than three thousand year.
Having his war at the beginning of the eighties with Iran gained him much respect in the Arabic world, because he stood up to them. The bluff with the WMDs was in the same category, it was to scare off the Iranians and give confidence to the Arab world that he would stop them if they would move.
The historical background. (Score:2, Informative)
During WW2, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbintrop pact, which carved up eastern Europe between Stalin and Hitler. Hitler later reneged, and invaded the area assigned to Stalin, taking over the Baltic States (Estonia, Lativa and Lithuania). The Russians later retook Eastern Europe, and re-occupied the Baltics. They didn't leave until the early 90s. Many Russians resettled in Estonia during the occupation, mostly taking lower level jobs - the standard of living has always been better there than in Russia. They now form about 1/3 of the population.
In central Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) the Soviets set up a war memorial to the Soviet 'liberators' who died driving out the Nazis. To the Estonians, however, the 'Bronze Soldier' just commemorated a second occupation - one that went on for nearly 50 years. In 2007 the now-independent Estonian government decided to move the statue to a Soviet military cemetary in the edge of town. The ethnic Russian Estonians objected, as did Russia, and Putin personally called it a desecration. There were riots, and even one death in Tallinn.
The statue was moved, and it was at this point that the cyberattack was launched.
The kid accused is a Russian Estonian. It remains unclear who ordered the attack - Putin's gang could easily have provoked otherwise uninvolved hackers in the Russian diaspora to act.
The attack certainly served Russia's interests at the time, punishing a tiny, resented upstart for daring to act with sovereignty. That there is plausible deniability doesnt clear Putin and his ex-KGB cronies.