I have a subscription to a journal called Government Computer News that has some interesting stuff in it from time to time. I was reading this interview just now with Lauri Almann who is the Permanent Undersecretary of Defence for the country of Estonia and he describes what it was like when his country experienced a state of siege on its computer networks.
GCN: Describe how the attacks unfolded.
Almann: We experienced two phases of attacks. The first phase was carried out by what we call hacktivists. Relatively primitive and simple attack tools were used against Estonia by ordinary people who are instructed to attack Estonia mostly on Russian Web sites and those on which the attack tools were posted. Those attack tools were designed against Estonian Web sites — and mostly government Web sites, such as the Estonian government Briefing Room, Estonian Ministry of Defense and certain leading parties in Estonia. But the organizers were not able to come up with a sufficient amount of people taking part in those attacks. And at some point, there was a general fatigue.
The second phase of the attacks used much more sophisticated attack tools — mainly botnets. This is a rough estimate, but [we’ve learned] the attacks came from 75 or more jurisdictions using 1 million or more computers.
The fascinating thing about this is that the people who owned those computers actually had no idea they were attacking another government. The notion of a personal computer is really counterintuitive. There is no such thing as a personal computer. Everyone’s computer can be used to attack another country.
http://www.gcn.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display....;story.id=46457Almann: The right to use the Internet is almost a human right that the government has to guarantee. We also believe e-services bring the government closer to the people. E-elections have tremendously increased turnouts in elections, especially among younger generations. We shouldn’t let the attacks affect our way of life. But we need to deal with those threats and learn from them.
