Estonia networks slammed by possible Russian cyber attacks

We certainly hope you dig the flavor of Russia and Estonia blended together in the morning, as your News Brews is probably cranking the mixture out en masse after reports that Russia has been waging a "cyber war" on Estonia for the past few weeks. Reportedly, Estonia's well-regarded networks have been "under heavy attack," saying that Russians are behind the mass outages of its state and commercial websites. Currently, Nato and EU officials are attempting to track down the culprits, and while Moscow has reportedly "denied any involvement in the internet attacks on its neighbor," relations between the two haven't exactly been rosy of late. Don't fret Estonia, if things get too bad, there's always Sealand.

[Via Guardian]

[Gil @ May 17th 2007 10:09AM]

you should add "not to scale" on that picture

[Andir3.0 @ May 17th 2007 10:20AM]

I kinda pictured Russia vs. India when I saw that picture, then I realized the position and scaling were all wrong. Well, that and it doesn't "quite" look like India.

[Robert @ May 17th 2007 11:31AM]

Ye, Estonia would be more like the size of the '.' in the VS.

But since when has engadget been particularly accurate in their depictions of geography.

[EDomain @ May 17th 2007 10:56AM]

I agree with Random Thoughts comment above. When will the world's governments decide that cyber attacks constitute an act of war? Furthermore, how can a government be sure another government has actually sponsored a cyber attack? I imagine it would be fairly easy for the Russian government to say "unknown hackers" are doing the attacks.

[Mylo @ May 17th 2007 1:53PM]

I'm from Estonia and all I've noticed going wrong here is that some government sites were down for a while and someone is hacking sites related to rallying :P

[sendmeaeuro @ May 17th 2007 3:23PM]

Finnish sites have been going down as well. YLE (The Finnish version of the BBC) main website went down because of an attack as well. So it's not just Estonia's sites!

http://sendmeaeuro.awardspace.com

[slyecho @ May 17th 2007 4:08PM]

I guess that's why downloading the Halo 3 Beta took forever.

[James @ May 17th 2007 4:35PM]

Slyecho: maybe you've got that backwards?

Heh, I bet the sheer force of 100,000 people downloading the beta in a single night *could* take out a whole country's 'net...

[Shodan @ May 18th 2007 6:48PM]

Well this has been going on for like 2 weeks and I haven't noticed a thing... Guess their cyber-attacking program is also from the 80s

Anyway, it sure isn't nice and I hope that NATO and EU will do something about it. Also, in our news it was stated that the attacks came from Russian governmental IPs. Someone is either spoofing them or the Russians got a little sloppy.