2007 cyber attack on Estonia launched by Kremlin-backed youth group

A country being outwitted, overwhelmed, and paralyzed by a group of teenagers? Apparently, yes. Members of a Kremlin-backed youth movement have claimed responsibility for May 2007 cyber attacks that crippled Estonia’s Internet in the midst of a diplomatic argument with Russia (see 30 September 2008 HS Daily Wire). It is believed to have been the first attack of its kind, directed against virtually the entire informational infra-structure of a NATO country.

The FT’s Charles Clover writes that Estonian officials said the attacks originated in Russia. They began after 27 April, when Estonia removed a Second World War Soviet memorial from its capital, Tallinn, provoking a storm of protest from Moscow. They continued to mid May.

Russia has consistently denied any involvement. Yesterday, however, Konstantin Goloskokov, a “commissar” in the youth group NASHE, which works for the Kremlin, told the Financial Times that he and some associates had launched the attack, which appears to be the first time anyone has claimed responsibility. “I wouldn’t have called it a cyber attack; it was cyber defense,” he said. We taught the Estonian regime the lesson that if they act illegally, we will respond in an adequate way.”

The attack, according to computer experts, was a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack, which is when hundreds or thousands of “zombie” computers are enlisted to overwhelm the target network. “We were attacked by 178 countries,” quipped Katrin Pargmae, a spokeswoman for the Estonian Informatics Center, which administers the state’s information systems, including the Internet.

Internet security experts said that the attacks on Estonia were actually tiny compared with the largest recorded attacks. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks, an Internet security company, is an expert on the Estonian attacks and said they measured about 100 MB per second of traffic, compared with the largest recorded attacks of 40 GB per second. He said that generating such an attack was quite simple, requiring “just a lot of people getting together and running the same tools on their home computers”.

Goloskokov said: “We did not do anything illegal. We just visited the various Internet sites, over and over, and they stopped working. We didn’t block them: they were blocked by themselves because of their own technical limitations in handling the traffic they encountered.” He denied that he and his associates were acting on the orders of the Russian government. “We did everything based on our own initiative,” he said.

NASHE is a privately financed youth movement and the brainchild of the Kremlin’s chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov. Sergei Markov, a parliamentarian and Goloskokov’s boss, volunteered the information that one of his assistants had planned and implemented the attack at a conference earlier this month. “As far as I know this is the first time anyone has claimed responsibility,” said Pargmae, who added that the matter was being handled by the Estonian police. Mr Nazario said that Nato had created a cyber defense center in Estonia last year.