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Cyber warfare
October 2007
Cyber Attacks in Estonia Serve as Wake-Up Call
By Breanne Wagner
 In late April, a wave of cyber attacks began disrupting nationwide network operations in the small Baltic state of Estonia. The attacks compromised both public and private websites and sent a wave of panic through a country that is known for being especially “wired.”
The first attacks coincided with the removal of a bronze statue of a World-War II era Soviet soldier from the town square in the capital city of Tallin. Estonia blamed the computer attacks on the Russian government.
Immediately following the attacks on Estonia’s computer networks, a flood of stories hit the Internet that painted a dark and stormy picture of future “cyberwars” that would result from the incursions.
For computer security experts, these doomsday scenarios were far from reality. The attacks are characterized as “cyber protest or activism,” says Dorothy Denning, a computer security expert at the Naval Postgraduate School. They were coupled with street-level protests by ethnic Russians living in Estonia, she notes.
Now that the dust has cleared, analysts believe that the attacks were most likely a result of political tensions between Russia and Estonia over the statue, and not a full-scale cyberwar that was meant to physically harm Estonian citizens through electronic attack.
The incident was more of a wake-up call than a threat to global computer security, says Ron Ritchey, principal at Booz Allen Hamilton.
The United States need not be worried, Ritchey says, because U.S. Internet service providers are much more capable of handling the type of attacks Estonia experienced, called denial of service attacks. They involve an attacker overwhelming a network with traffic or disrupting service to specific systems or Internet users.
Others agree that such an attack would have little national impact in the United States. When Estonian computers were first compromised, Capitol Hill asked the Department of Homeland Security if such an attack could happen in the United States, says Jerry Dixson, director of the national cyber security division at DHS. “I only think it could have regional impact,” he says.
Although the incident was not seen as a major attack, it still had significant impact on Estonia. The parliament, banking systems and media outlets were compromised, prompting the country to reach out for help.
The “worldwide community helped to protect them” and contain the situation, Ritchey says. The Defense Department sent a team of officials from DHS, FBI and the Secret Service to assist, says Dixson. The team is still analyzing the vast amount of information and will “try to learn something from this.”
Please email your comments to BWagner@ndia.org
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