Current Event: Kremlin loyalist admits to launching DDoS attack on Estonia
According to an article from Rueters (http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52B4D820090313?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0), Konstantin Goloskokov, a member of a Russian youth movement recently claimed responsibility to organizing a group of fellow supporters and executing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonian internet sites, causing them to crash, approximately 2 years ago. The attack was allegedly in response to the Estonian government’s movement to dismantle a WW2 soviet army monument.
The event brings up the interesting topic of cyber-warfare. Though Goloskokov claimed that he had no support whatsoever fro m the youth group or the Russian government, and both the group and government deny involvement, it doesn’t seem too unlikely that attacks on internet infrastructure will become a major part of modern warfare (and in many cases, it probably already is). As the world relies on the internet increasingly more to do its everyday business, an attack on websites used by the government or major corporations in that country could cause significant damages. In this case, the Estonian web sites were probably very poorly equipped to handle large amounts of traffic, as a group of friends was able to shut them down, but security measures must be put in place because DDoS attacks by large botnets could be much more difficult to handle.
It appears measures could have been made to prevent this attack, as Goloskokov claims that each individual made multiple requests to websites, so checking for an excessive number of connections from a single IP address may have been able to help prevent the attack. One positive outcome of this attack was that it increased the awareness of NATO, among other agencies, to the threats presented by cyber-warfare, and the necessity of putting measures in place to thwart it.
Comment by Matt
March 13, 2009 @ 3:38 pm
like GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle. Any DDoS attack launched ‘in the wild’ (by which I mean outside of a lab environment and not for the purposes of research) will not only provide valuable intel on the extent of the attack, but will also raise awareness of security personnel, both civilian and military.
Ability to respond to internet based attack is largely unknown to the public in the US, and I fear that, like most major issues here, we won’t become fully aware of it until a catastrophe occurs. We can only hope that there are enough forward thinking individuals in place with plans to respond to such an event