Kremlin-Backed Nashi Admits Cyberattacking Estonia

An anonymous reader writes "Russia's Kremlin-based youth movement Nashi admits being responsible for 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia. An interesting point is that when you DDoS the systems, it's not the fault of some people who want to crash it but instead the systems' for blocking their users due to technical limitations. So if I shot someone to death it's not my fault for shooting them, but theirs instead because of technical limitations of their body."

Comments

Waiting for the Russian nationalists...

[NeutronCowboy]

Stories like this are guaranteed to bring out the Russian nationalists... The Estonians deserved it, Nashi is a misunderstood organization, or that it was really just completely normal operation with no nefarious intent. It's always fun to read the ideological contortions used to justify crap like this.

All I can say is that Russia is acting like a local thug - swinging around its energy club, demanding internatiol recognition and tribute from its vassal states. Not to say that this is a bad way of achieving its goal, but it certainly puts the Kibosh on some historians' argument that the fall of Russian Communism signaled the end of autocratic and thuggish regimes. Instead, this tells me that nationalism (in its ugliest form) is alive and well across the world (including in the US, btw), and that we're in for a whole lot of fun not seen since the dawn of the last century.

Woo.

Re:Waiting for the Russian nationalists...

[NeutronCowboy]

Uhhhh.... Nashi is sponsored by the Russian government. Its explicit goal is the purging of fascist elements from Russian zones of interests. It is habitually violent, xenophobic and nationalistic. A small, scripted DDOS is actually pretty benign for Nashi's MO. If Estonia wasn't an independent country with close ties to NATO, there would have been a hell of a lot more physical violence coming from Nashi.

And while you're right that guilt by association is a cheap way to judge people, past experience says that this operation quite likely met with approval at all levels of the organization. In that sense, it's quite like the Russian Government: very few things happen that aren't blessed or encouraged in principle by the head brass.