DoS Attacks on Estonia Were Launched by Student

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."

Comments

Giving weapons to the irresponsible

[Kupfernigk]

It won't be popular here, but I will say it. The greatest risk to stable society is its young men. It's not surprising that Australian first peoples used to put a lot of effort into controlling them, that the Amish let them live outside their society till they get it out of their system, and that other societies have put them into armies under strict discipline. The combination of increasing strength, hormonal confusion, and social pressure makes them volatile and dangerous. Fifty percent of us have been through it, 100% know about it, but in Western societies we continue to give them dangerous weapons knowing that they are not mature enough to handle them. That includes cars, guns, and computers.

Once, the damage that young men could cause was limited because weapons were limited. Mind you, a machete is a pretty hazardous weapon. But give them RPGs or botnets, and the ability to cause a lot of damage escalates.

At the end of WW2, a lot of allied soldiers were traumatized because they had to shoot adolescent males. This is because they were equipped with weapons like fausts, and were totally irresponsible. They were simply emotionally and intellectually unequipped to understand what they were doing. They would surrender and then try to kill people. If they were treated kindly, they would take it as a sign of weakness and attack again. (I'm not suggesting that only adolescent males do malicious things on the Internet, but at least professional criminals want as few people as possible to know what they are up to, and are unlikely to cause public mayhem.)

The long term consequences of this could yet be that the irresponsible behaviour of the few will affect the many, when societies decide to block access to most of the Internet to all except an approved few. I don't have a clue what the right answer is, but if the IT community cannot come up with a means of regulation, governments may yet take its toys away.