Information Warfare & Cyberterrorism

Information Warfare & Cyberterrorism

Russian denial-of-service attack

a) April 26, 2007 marked the beginning of the series of denial-of-service attacks in the country of Estonia that wrecked the IT system of the country. Among other factors, the relocation of the Bronze Soldier memorial from Tallinn's main square formed the major contributor to this socio-political unrest in Estonia. first attacks was launched at the prime minister's reform party website and by the end of first week it had branched to other government websites including Estonian parliament (Kim et al., 2004).

On May 9 the country experienced the most devastating and heaviest attack with 4 million packets of information sent per second engulfing the countries massive banking systems causing disastrous effects as 97% of the banking were done online.

b) The unstable political situation in the country and its heavy reliance on internet and online services, Russians saw this as an opportunity to strike.

c) The cyber attacks began relatively at a small scale and then spread like wildfire within the span of three weeks largely jamming the country's websites, banking systems, newspapers and ministries (Schwartau, 1996). The cyber attacks began relatively at a small scale and then spread like wildfire within the span of three weeks largely jamming the country's websites, banking systems, newspapers and ministries.

d) The hacker was traced to be a student of Russian origin residing in Estonia named Dmitri Galushkevich who pled guilty and admitted to being a party to the crime as a protest against the removal of the Bronze Soldier. The hackers adopted a very methodical approach with the use of weblogs, web journals and Russian language chat rooms.

e) After the end of this cyber war on May 19, Estonia and NATO as a whole has taken significant steps to increase awareness of cyber related issues and identify ...