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Russia Accused of Cyber-War Against Estonia
earthlingpink writes about the ongoing DDoSing of Estonia. The Guardian is reporting that Russia stands accused of engaging in a three-week-long series of cyber-attacks. Government, banking, and media websites have been targeted. It is unclear whether the attacks are sanctioned or initiated by the Russian Government, but Estonian authorities believe that to be the case. NATO has sent security experts to Tallinn to help beef up defenses. The Estonian defense minister said, "At present, NATO does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of... collective self-defense, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country... this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."
By now, most of the sites under attack have been blocked to the outside traffic. That by itself means the attacks have been successful, information from Estonian government stays in the country.
How would you you fight a DDoS attack and make sure all non-bot users have access?
The problem is the flaws that are being attacked aren't necessarily resident on the machines being attacked - as you know, since you mention zombie computers.
But that doesn't make cyber attack bullshit. That's like saying that land invasions are a made up boogeyman because they depend on flaws like "not having a giant impregnable wall surrounding your country." DDoS attacks, in particular, are problematic. A given target has no way to prevent zombied machines from participating in the attack.
Besides which, a DDoS attack is just a bandwidth race. If my home PC were to be attacked like this, there's nothing I, personally, can do about it. My router won't pass any of the packets to my machine, but if there's 6 Mbps worth of incoming traffic, even if I drop it at the router, I still can't get much legit traffic through. I can call my provider, and see if they can stop it upstream, but then it's just a comparison of the bandwidth at the DSLAM to the bandwidth of the attacker. The only thing to hope for is that, somewhere up the chain, you can reach a node with enough bandwidth that the attacker can't overwhelm it. When you start getting up into backbone territory, this isn't a problem.
But - if we hypothesize for the moment an actual planned assault by a country - odds are pretty good that the US DoD, for example, has more bandwidth than Iran.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I think the general consensus among those who watch the geopolitical scene is that Russia is attempting to rebuild its empire. It views the Baltic states pretty much as China views Tibet, but because of their NATO membership, Russia can't just march the troops in, so it's using agent provocateurs from among the ethnic Russian minority in the country as well as defacto economic sanctions and cyber attacks to push its weight around. If you think what Russia is doing in Estonia is bad, look at the kind of games they're playing in the Ukraine, which is furiously trying to Westernize and shed its Russian colonial past. Christ, they poisoned Viktor Yushchenko to prevent him from gaining power. The KGB is still very much alive and well. Russia may have had a brief flirtation with friendly relations with the West, but they day is done, and now it wants its empire back.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've said this again, but until Russia (and other Eastern bloc countries) start taking cybercrime seriously, it should just be cut off the net entirely.
Most of the botnets in the world are controlled by Russian mafia. The rest of the world is spending an insane amount of time, money and effort defending against these attacks that orginate 90% from one part of the world. It's like criminally created welfare program, and we're all paying.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
The statue has also practical meaning.
It has become focus point of Russian nationalists in Estonia who are Estonian version of neo nazis. Given any excuses those nationalists used to gather near the statue, get drunk and start breaking places, and in many cases also people, including tourists.
The problems did get bad enough that Finnish tourists were advised to steer clear of the statue during night.
And since tourism is important income to Estonia, it is clear that the statue had to go. They could have picked better time to do it, like couple months after victory day celebrations.