Erster echter Cyberwar gegen Estland?

--- Über die "terroristischen" digitalen Angriffe auf estnische Server ist ja schon einiges berichtet worden und es stellte sich die Frage, ob da nicht auch ein wenig Übertreibung im Spiel war. Die New York Times fasst den Ablauf der Ereignisse bisher heute noch einmal zusammen und meint, dass es sich um den ersten echten Cyberwar gehandelt haben könnte. Davon war bei früheren Auseinandersetzungen etwa zwischen israelischen und palästinensischen oder chinesischen und taiwanesischen Crackern aber auch schon des öfteren die Rede:

What followed was what some here describe as the first war in cyberspace, a monthlong campaign that has forced Estonian authorities to defend their pint-size Baltic nation from a data flood that they say was set off by orders from Russia or ethnic Russian sources in retaliation for the removal of the statue. The Estonians assert that an Internet address involved in the attacks belonged to an official who works in the administration of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which came close to shutting down the country’s digital infrastructure, clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers. “It turned out to be a national security situation,” Estonia’s defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, said in an interview. “It can effectively be compared to when your ports are shut to the sea.” Computer security experts from NATO, the European Union, the United States and Israel have since converged on Tallinn to offer help and to learn what they can about cyberwar in the digital age. “This may well turn out to be a watershed in terms of widespread awareness of the vulnerability of modern society,” said Linton Wells II, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration at the Pentagon. “It has gotten the attention of a lot of people.” ... When the first digital intruders slipped into Estonian cyberspace at 10 p.m. on April 26, Mr. Aarelaid figured he was ready. He had erected firewalls around government Web sites, set up extra computer servers and put his staff on call for a busy week. By April 29, Tallinn’s streets were calm again after two nights of riots caused by the statue’s removal, but Estonia’s electronic Maginot Line was crumbling. In one of the first strikes, a flood of junk messages was thrown at the e-mail server of the Parliament, shutting it down. In another, hackers broke into the Web site of the Reform Party, posting a fake letter of apology from the prime minister, Andrus Ansip, for ordering the removal of the highly symbolic statue. At that point, Mr. Aarelaid, a former police officer, gathered security experts from Estonia’s Internet service providers, banks, government agencies and the police. He also drew on contacts in Finland, Germany, Slovenia and other countries to help him track down and block suspicious Internet addresses and halt traffic from computers as far away as Peru and China. The bulk of the cyberassaults used a technique known as a distributed denial-of-service attack. By bombarding the country’s Web sites with data, attackers can clog not only the country’s servers, but also its routers and switches, the specialized devices that direct traffic on the network. To magnify the assault, the hackers infiltrated computers around the world with software known as bots, and banded them together in networks to perform these incursions. The computers become unwitting foot soldiers, or “zombies,” in a cyberattack. In one case, the attackers sent a single huge burst of data to measure the capacity of the network. Then, hours later, data from multiple sources flowed into the system, rapidly reaching the upper limit of the routers and switches. ... In the early hours of May 9, traffic spiked to thousands of times the normal flow. May 10 was heavier still, forcing Estonia’s biggest bank to shut down its online service for more than an hour. Even now, the bank, Hansabank, is under assault and continues to block access to 300 suspect Internet addresses. It has had losses of at least $1 million. Finally, on the afternoon of May 10, the attackers’ time on the rented servers expired, and the botnet attacks fell off abruptly. All told, Arbor Networks measured dozens of attacks. The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each.

Und sonst: Irak spukt immer mehr Dschihad-Anhänger aus: Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq. The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Nicht unterzukriegen: Berlusconi siegt bei Regionalwahlen. Bei den italienischen Kommunal- und Provinzwahlen hat das Mitte-Rechts-Lager von Oppositionschef Silvio Berlusconi deutliche Gewinne verbucht.

Die etwas anderen Citizen-Reporter: Leser sollen "Bild" besser machen. Die "Bild" will mehr auf ihre Leser hören und gründet einen Leserbeirat. Dieser soll die Redaktion über Interessen, Sorgen und Probleme informieren. Wer Mitglied werden will, muss zunächst einen Fragebogen ausfüllen - und damit seine Loyalität unter Beweis stellen.