Famous Cyber Attacks: #2 Estonian Cyberwar

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberwar43z/2012/12/21/estonia-ddos-attackrussian-nationalism/

The Estonian Cyberwar will not go down in history as the first example of a real, full-scale cyberwar, but probably as one of the largest coordinated cyberattacks up to now. It is important to clarify the fact, that the Estonian cyberwar cannot really be classified as cyberwar, as it only had minimal impact on the Estonian economy.

The whole incident started out in 2007 with the Estonian government planning to relocate a memorial of WWII, the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, from its original place. This led to tensions between the ethnic Estonians and Russian-speaking immigrants in Estonia and even strained relations between Estonia and Russia, as the protests regarding this relocation became more and more numerous.

The whole situation ended with countless cyberattacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, on Estonia, which lasted for several days. The main targets of these attacks were Estonian banks, news agencies, private Estonian companies as well as government websites. Though these attacks lead to a slowing-down of commerce and to several hours of offline servers, the real-world damage of these attacks was only minimal.

Evidence suggested that the attacks were of Russian origin, though it was not clear whether the Russian government had played a role in the attacks or not or whether the whole thing was the work of patriotic Russian hackers. Only two years later it was found out that the perpetrators of the attack were members of the Nashi youth group, a state-affiliated organization.

The Estonian cyberwar has not become famous for its scope or uniqueness, but for the fact that it established cyberattacks as a political weapon. Through cyberattacks, a nation achieves the power the silence another nation, to take over its infrastructure and destroys their ability to communicate with the world outside its borders.

We still do not know whether or not a full-scale war could be the result of cyberattacks, or a cyberwar, in that case. What we know is that there is an ongoing arms-race taking place in the cyberworld, but we are unsure about how it could affect the lives of civilians.