Peter Goodspeed, National Post . Saturday, Oct. 23, 2010
Cyber warfare battles have already been fought in Estonia and Georgia.
For three weeks in the spring of 2007, Estonia, which has one of the highest
levels of Internet penetration in Europe, was bombarded with a wave of
sophisticated cyber attacks that targeted the country's parliament, banks,
newspaper and government ministries.
The denial of service attacks, from tens of thousands of computers in Russia
and around the world effectively paralyzed Estonia.
Estonian officials, who for weeks had been embroiled in a bitter diplomatic
dispute with Russia over the removal of a Soviet-era monument, were quick to
blame the Kremlin for the attacks.
The Russians denied the charge.
But months later, an aide to one of the leaders of the then-president
Vladimir Putin's pro-Kremlin United Russia party claimed responsibility for
the cyber attacks, saying they were an "act of civil disobedience" by the
pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi.
Estonian experts discount that claim, saying the attacks were too
sophisticated to be the work of a single group of mischievous hackers.
A year later, when Russia and Georgia had a brief border war, the Russian
ground invasion was preceded by a denial of service attack on the Georgian
government's websites.
"Everyone assumed this was coming from Russian websites, but research we
have done showed you can't really tell," said Ron Deibert, a
telecommunications expert who runs the Citizen Lab research facility at
University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. "More importantly
though, we found that the tools that were used in the attack were associated
with the criminal underground. They had been used to attack banking sites,
pornographic websites and engaging in extortion, long before the Georgian
attacks. So they were either operating on their own in a patriotic manner or
they were contracted out by the government."
There is widespread suspicion Russia was renting the services of cyber
criminals in much the same way great powers gave letters of marque to
privateers in the 17th and 18th centuries and authorized them to attack
foreign shipping.
"It is more effective for them to cultivate a criminal underground in order
to shield their own identities," Prof. Deibert said.
That sort of flexible anonymity worries U.S. policy makers.
"Cyber attacks offer a means for potential adversaries to overcome
overwhelming U.S. advantages in conventional military power and to do so in
ways that are instantaneous and exceedingly hard to trace," said William
Lynn, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence. "A dozen determined computer
programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the
United States global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind
its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on
target."
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