Cyber warfare: Estonia attack

Varun Kapoor *

After targeting persons, properties & governments – cyber criminals have now resorted to targeting countries! Sometimes such attacks are state sponsored as a kind of legitimate forceful action against a hostile or enemy state.

However the disturbing trend is that many times states target friendly countries, in attacks that target the critical infrastructure of that state. This may be done to cripple the economy of the country or to discredit its image.

Either way immense hardships are caused to the common citizens of the targeted country and that too sometimes by a friendly neighbor or ally. This is the world of cyber warfare.

Cyber warfare is carried out by states on other countries for three major purposes. First is espionage – that is to get secret information about that nation, to the benefit of the attacker nation and detriment to the target nation.

The second is for sabotage – to damage the critical infrastructure and damage military systems. The third is a denial of service attack. That will cripple its essential services and networks to the detriment of that nation.

The best example of this form of cyber warfare is the attack carried out on a small Baltic country called Estonia. This is a tiny nation of 1.3 million inhabitants located on the Baltic Sea of Northern Europe. In April 2007 the Estonian Government decided to move a memorial honoring the Estonian liberation from Nazi occupation by Soviet troops, to a less prominent place in its capital city of Tallinn. This triggered riots in Estonia and a virtual war erupted. This war was directed against Estonia by the Russians.

In one major incident – two Russian hackers aged around 22 years flew down from Russia to London in the UK. Here they checked into a descript hotel and using a laptop hacked into and accessed the power grid of Estonia. Estonia being a small nation, it had only one such grid. After this unauthorized access the hackers proceeded to introduce a virus in this grid. As a result the entire grid was shutdown and the power of the entire country went out.

It was peak of winters when this attack took place and it caused untold hardship and loss to the country and the citizens alike. In modern times and in advanced countries most of the civic amenities are run by computerized and automated systems called SCADA systems. Thus they require power for their functioning.

Power outage across the country ensured that with the electricity failure – heating was shutdown; water supply ceased to function; traffic signals were shutdown; public transport was shutdown; schools, colleges & hospitals were all shutdown. In short the entire country came to a groaning and grinding halt.

Estonia is a technologically advanced country – the Skype system was developed there. Still it took their experts seven days to take the virus out of the system and sanitize it. Then the system was bought in line one by one. In these seven days the country and its citizens faced untold hardship and the loss was also inestimable.

It is said that had the Russians with their entire army and weaponry attacked Estonia – they could not have caused as much human and financial damage as was caused by this attack. The army was two teenagers and their weapon was a laptop. This is the world of CYBER WARFARE.

Countries like USA, China, Iran, Russia, Israel, North Korea etc are heavily into cyber warfare both as aggressors and as targets. In India too the realization that cyber warfare is a real and present danger is dawning on the security establishment.

The Indian Army is reputed to be in the process of setting up a Cyber Command along with a brand new Aero-space Command. When this becomes fully functional – the cyber security of our land as well as of the citizens will improve manifold.

But till then it is individual awareness and police performance that will ensure good quality defense against cyber attacks by criminals as well as cyber soldiers.


[Views expressed in the column are of the author himself]