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Estonian Cyber Defence Hub Set Up
w1z4rd writes "The BBC reports that seven Nato nations have backed a new cyber defence centre in Estonia, which last year blamed Russia for weeks of attacks on its internet structure. The US will initially send an observer to the project, which will have some 30 staff when fully operational in August."
Did anyone else read that as "Elbonia" when they first read it? I was picturing an ungodly amalgamation of mud, wooden slingshots, 286s, and farm animals...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I work for the Department of Disinformation and Psychological Warfare at Microsoft. Sounded cool when I applied but I just spend all my time trolling slashdot and submitting bits of Windows source code to ReactOS.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Estonians have always rejected Russian interference in their affairs.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I think this is evidence of a trend towards international organizations to create divisions or authorities responsible for cyber governance/monitoring/standardization/accountability.
I am keeping my eyes peeled for a new division/center in the UN for cyberspace soon.
Well, Estonia is an independent nation and a member of NATO - how much more "encroachment" can this be?
And if you ask me, the rest of the world pays far too much attention to Russian whining about the lost glories of their empire as it is. The Russian government deliberately and systematically attacked Estonia's infrastructure last year - now NATO should place the defence hub somewhere else so as to be sensitive to Russian feelings? Ridiculous.
Being an Estonian I can say that the so called attacks weren't really such a big deal. Basically a few government web pages (parliament's, government's president's and couple more) were DDOS'ed for a couple of hours from Russian ips. It's not like this caused too much trouble (the government's infranet still worked just fine, the citizens just couldn't access the pages). I do think that the idea of Cyber Defence is quite cool and I'm glad, that we're the pioneers here but it does seem that this really is the primary reason here, to pioneer something. It might still become useful one day and I'll be interested to see how this rolls out. I do enjoy the fact that the small size of Estonia allows us to try all the new IT solutions on quite a large scale very fast. So far we've done quite well and I hope that we can do something revolutionary on the international scale as well. The IT innovation part of Estonia is really something I'm proud of.
They'll never defend anything with a hub. At the very least they should get a router. ~
Estonians should get real and find the ways to cooperate with Russia, not to pretend that Russia does not exist. You just can't deliberately ignore a 100 mln people living next to you, not to mention enraging them. You should account for their feelings when making political decisions.
And that does not mean that Estonia should give up its sovereignty. You just cannot be totally independent from your neighbours. Estonia is no island.
Coding etudes
Russian propaganda has got you nevertheless... The exaggerated glaims by Russia which are fed to their public are very hypocritical considering the facism, neonazism, racism, putinjugend and human rights violations present in Russia.
I'd say its not Estonia playing up, but Russia, whose people still worship the old Soviet Nation. Can you believe they actually believe the soviets "liberated" Estonia in World War II? But estonians still very well remember the mass deportations and silent genocide conducted by the KGB.
As for present-day Russia - they're cocky again and are looking to rule over neighbouring nations. The false information they're planting into the minds of their citizens clearly indicates they are hostile toward other nations. It's definately a global threat!
You anonymous coward! Need I remind you the soviets had already conquered Estonia by the time the nazis came? Therefore the nazis were at first seen by many as someone to liberate us from the soviet rule which had oppressed us by then already. Estonians just wanted to have their free country, not to be under russian influence. Nazism as an ideology was not supported! Estonians remember the crimes of nazis in Estonia, but the crimes soviet russia did in Estonia during and after the war are by far greater in number and extent.
Estonia commemorates all estonians that fought for the freedom of Estonia. We fought alongside germany when the soviets conquered us, and we fought alongside russia when nazis conquered us. We supported neither ideology, all we ever wanted is a free country and peace. Both nazis and soviets tried to enslave us, russia succeeded for a short while. As far as most estonians are concerned the nazis and the soviets were not much different. Both were ruthless tyrants towards Estonia, "pigs" if you like. Russia still appears to be a tyrant nation as indicated by its foreign policies.
Russia, for God's sake, leave us be! We're no match for your military - please stop bullying us.
"The Russian government deliberately and systematically attacked Estonia's infrastructure last year"
This is of course pure bullshit (tm). And yes, I am Estonian too and know quite a bit about this "attack". Essentially some pissed of guys bought DDoS against some Estonian websites (mainly media and some government) and that was it. There were nothing special in this DDoS, just http queries coming from host of usual suspects (countries with lax security & no ISP filtering of bad traffic) - no notable traffic from Russia.
Of course the DDoS was bad in our context, our 100mbit line was something like 98-99% full and only upstream filters at ISP managed to block it. But was it cyberwar by Russia? Hardly.
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L.