The cyberattacks that bombarded Estonia, knocked out the websites of government departments, political parties, media groups and banks of the world’s most wired countries, according to TIME magazine. The sophistication of the attacks was unprecedented, and it marked the first time the power centers of a country were targeted simultaneously. The attacks began on April 27, when the Estonian authorities removed a controversial war memorial from a park. The bulk of the strikes involved what are known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in which websites were overwhelmed by a number of requests for information far higher than normal, bringing the sites’ networks of servers and routers to a complete halt. On May 10, during the peak of the cyberattacks, hundreds of thousands of computers from all over the globe were barraging targeted Estonian websites with thousands of times the normal flow of data.
This should not be the cause of concern for the Estonians only, but to everyone in the world as well. The attacks have shown us how vulnerable the Internet is in the face of an assault. The “tools and instructions are readily available at low cost”, says Oliver Friedrichs, a director at the security response unit of Symantec, which makes it all the more easier to lay siege to targeted websites. According to timesonline.co.uk, the number of computer viruses has reached one million for the first time. Symantec has reported that just over 711,000 new viruses were discovered, an increase of 468 per cent on the number identified the previous year, and they are all capable of creating havoc. For example, the blasé and infamous Trojan e-mail attacks are used to purloin confidential data from secure networks. Free to perform tasks reserved only for the owner, the invader is able to steal passwords, upload documents and transmit new attacks.
Defending against these attacks is not all that easy either. Large companies have the modal to invest in state-of-the-art hardware that detects off patterns of requests for its websites and steer away from dubious ones. Smaller firms, however, will face problem to fend against these malicious attacks. They are not used to large volumes of traffic and they also lack the money to help face the onslaught of the incursions. Facing massive bombardments like what happened in Estonia, even well-equipped government networks can be brought down.
Head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Alexander Neill worries that this kind of cybercrime, breaking into top-secret networks for reconnaissance, could serve terrorists logistics or research cells. Given their command and control over things, we are left with no doubt that the terrorists have experts capable of causing such damage. Fortunately, there is reason to assure us that the terrorists might not attempt the sort of online blitzkrieg experienced by Estonia. “Terrorism is about creating true fear with spectacularly lurid attacks,” says Oxford’s Zittrain. They would “rather do something physical.”
What do you think of cybercrime and the problem it poses?
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