Cyber-Terrorism Has Become a Reality - The Russia-Estonia Cyber-Terrorism Face Off

Cyberterrorism may have been a thing only imaginable in the past, but today it seems a reality and a worrying possibility for the world at large. So many countries these days rely heavily on their computers and related technology to carry out daily activities. Imagine your computer being inaccessible for a week. Now imagine that your bank's computer is also down, as is your local new company's, and your place of work. You turn to the government for answers, but the library computers are down, the fire department, 911, the hospitals, local government offices, everything is down. How would you live? This sort of wide scale disturbance is possible with cyberterrorism, and now there is an example of just how disturbing cyberterrorism can be.

One country heavily dependent on modern technology is Estonia, a country in Eastern Europe who recently implored NATO to take a position against cyberterrorism after accusing Russia of cyberterrorism against their country. For the third time in one week Estonia experienced attacks on their government, banking, and media websites. These attacks used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which flooded Estonian websites with false information shutting down a number of government (including military) and banking (Blomfield, 2007) sites rendering the country extremely vulnerable.

While Estonian officials are blaming the Russians and the Russian government, there is no hard evidence to link the Russian government to the attacks. The Estonian government has been able to trace the initial IP addresses to Russian government offices and the Telegraph UK notes that this includes a link to President Vladimir Putin's office (Blomfield, 2007). Still, the Estonians believe that they were invaded by thousands of computers around the world, not only from the Russian government, but by individuals encouraged through an instructional website. Tracing of the exact perpetrators is further confounded by the fact that many infiltrations were done via robots. At this point it seems hard to pin down where exactly the prosecution for the offense should lie.

While government sites have worked day and night to block hostile addresses from accessing their data and stopping their symptoms, banking and media companies are still struggling to recover (Blomfield, 2007).

This story seems to illustrate the growing threat posed by cyberterrorism and the lack of ability of many countries around the world to deal with it. That's not even mentioning prosecution which, on a grand scale such as this case, seems nearly impossible.

Blomfield, A. (2007 May 19). Russia accused over Estonian 'cyber-terrorism'. Telegraph UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/17/westonia117.xml