{"id":920,"date":"2007-05-23T16:57:03","date_gmt":"2007-05-24T00:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/23\/estonia-in-putins-crosshairs-ddos-attack-and-counterattack\/"},"modified":"2007-05-23T16:57:03","modified_gmt":"2007-05-24T00:57:03","slug":"estonia-in-putins-crosshairs-ddos-attack-and-counterattack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/estonia-in-putins-crosshairs-ddos-attack-and-counterattack\/","title":{"rendered":"Estonia in Putin’s Crosshairs – DDos Attack and Counterattack"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Future is Here: Russia and Estonia are living up to the fantasies of hack sci-fi authors and computer security salesmen.  They are engaging in a virtual war. <\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

The reasons for this war are pretty thin – most political insiders in Moscow dismiss this as a shallow and meaningless concoction on the part of Putin, designed mainly to distract the Russian electorate in an election year.  It’s old and time-worn tactic,<\/a> but one that still finds favor<\/a> with politicians that want to play the old magician "nothing up my sleeve" distraction game.   <\/p>\n

My friend Dave Mitchell devoted the latter part of a column on his blog to this issue, and I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the events as they have unfolded. In a nutshell, the Estonians took down a gaudy bronze statue of a Soviet soldier a couple weeks before the big May 9 V-E Day celebrations.  Putin seized on the action (the Estonians were apparently not getting rid of the statue, just moving it to another place) and branded the Estonians as a bunch of pro-Nazi ingrates who were persecuting the ethnic Russians, yada yada blah blah. <\/p>\n

I particularly liked the pictures of the forlorn pro-Russia protesters chasing after the Estonian ambassador’s car, as it pulled away from the embassy, on its way to a vacation.  The "youth groups" that are making the most noise are widely known to be paid by the Kremlin to feign outrage and generate flashy TV images. <\/p>\n

No big deal.  But in the last couple of weeks, the conflict has moved to a whole new arena – cyberspace.  Estonia’s economy is apparently quite web-dependent.  Russian hackers have pretty much taken down the Estonian web presence through waves of DDoS attacks.  (Quick explanation: DoS is "Denial of Service" which is what happens when a whole bunch of zombie robot slave computers under the control of a hacker all try to access your webservers at the same time.  In real-world traffic terms, it’s like sending a million cars to jam the drive-thru windows of Mickey D’s.)
\"Moscow_times_estonia_for_dave_m_3\"<\/a>
Check out the front page of the Moscow Times, scanned here for your convenience:\n<\/p>\n

This is the story from a couple of weeks ago, when Putin gave a fiery speech during the May 9 parades, denouncing the Estonians.  <\/p>\n

The latest update from Moscow says that the tactic is starting to spread in the provocation\/response pattern so familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to, well, just about any of the wars in the last century or so.  Viz: <\/p>\n

\n

Hackers this year have also attacked the sites of groups as politically
\ndisparate as the ultranationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration;
\nthe pro-Kremlin youth groups Nashi, Young Russia and Mestniye; and The
\nOther Russia, the opposition coalition that has organized a series of
\nDissenters’ Marches this year.<\/p>\n

Alexander Kalugin, a spokesman for Young Russia, said
\na six-hour DDoS attack on his group’s web site in March was likely the
\nwork of Estonian nationalists angered over its protests outside the
\nEstonian Embassy over plans to relocate a Soviet World War II monument
\nin central Tallinn that sparked a recent diplomatic dispute.<\/span><\/p>\n

"We were burning Estonian banners and trampling an effigy of the Estonian president," Kalugin said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Movement Against Illegal Immigration had 40 of
\nits regional web sites struck by DDoS attacks from early February to
\nearly April, said Alexander Belov, the organization’s leader. <\/span><\/p>\n

Belov blamed the security services for carrying out the attacks under the pretext of battling extremism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m tempted to say that any kind of warfare that doesn’t involve streets choked with bodies and rubble is an improvement – but I am uneasy.  The fact that more and more people are getting hip to the idea that there are cheap and easy ways to hit below the belt; the fact that the web is still very vulnerable to this kind of thing – all that is definitely a blinking red light. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Future is Here: Russia and Estonia are living up to the fantasies of hack sci-fi authors and computer security salesmen.  They are engaging in a virtual war.   The reasons for this war are pretty thin – most political insiders in Moscow dismiss this as a shallow and meaningless concoction on the part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[847,352,353,105,354],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-journalism","tag-online-multimedia","tag-politix","tag-travel","tag-weblogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artesianmedia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}