Peter's Technology Trumpet

The internal affairs of the small Baltic republic of Estonia hit the global news headlines in April when its ethnic Russian minority rioted in protest of the removal of a Red army war memorial.

As a resident of another small country, I know that the weight of history can cause a difficult relationship with a more powerful neighbor. But Culloden was 350 years ago - for some ethnic Estonians the demise of the 1st Estonian republic and mass deportations following the 2nd World War are still within living memory. (Disclaimer: Regular readers of this column will know that as Mrs Ferry hails from Estonia, I may express some bias.)

The Kremlin's response to these events bordered on the sinister, with threatened sanctions and a failure to defend the Estonian embassy in Moscow against pro-Kremlin youth groups. Its all a bit scary for a country of 1.3 million people positioned next to the Kremlin's military might, which perhaps Estonian PM Andrus Ansip should have considered before he started baiting the Russian bear by removing the statue of the Red Army soldier.

Meanwhile back in the UK the Baltic political situation is of some interest to any follower of international news, but more significantly we may just have witnessed the first CyberWar on record. By mid-May it became apparent that Estonian government, media, email and commercial web servers were under a deliberate and targeted attack. These took the form of massive spam attacks on government email servers, distributed denial of service attacks on key Internet banking sites, and hacking/defacement of significant websites such as the ruling political parties homepage.

Estonia is possibly the most switched on of the EU countries in terms of penetration of paperless government, web-based banking and ambitious plans for country-wide WiMAX networks. So the Estonian government considered this a substantial threat to national security, and didn't take long to call in the Internet security spooks from NATO, Israel and elsewhere. The attacks peaked around the time of the Russian Victory Day public holiday on May 9th. The most damaging attack was probably on national bank Hansapank's website, which was forced to shut down for an hour - and for a week or so afterwards, I found that along with all foreign IP addresses, I had been blocked from their Internet banking site - a simple but effective line of defence. The skills and preparedness of Estonian companies, their IT security experts, and the swift response of international partners were all instrumental in avoiding more serious consequences.

Whilst there was some evidence that these attacks were Kremlin sponsored, as any Internet security expert will tell you, the use of Botnet's and Zombies around the World makes the ultimate source of the attack almost impossible to identify. But its clear that this was an orchestrated and organised attack, and was a highly successful terrorist attack on a sovereign state. The Kremlin has denied all involvement, but conspiracy theorists will point the finger at Putin following the Alexander Litvinenko affair. And now there is even now some evidence of counter-attacks from Estonia 

What this situation has graphically illustrated is that IT Security is no longer an issue which is only important to Chief Security Officers and IT Security propeller-heads. Scotland's top technology journalist Bill Magee pointed out that "CORPORATE Scotland [...] could be hit by exactly the same sort of cyber criminal attack that brought state and commercial website systems crashing to a halt"  

Here in Microsoft Scotland, we continue to invest in our network of Partner companies with the Security Solutions competency. These companies have proven skills and experience in design and deployment of the security infrastructure, policy and tools. With the availability of Forefront Client Security, Microsoft is unique in providing a comprehensive line of business security tools which can help Corporate Scotland establish robust Internet defenses.

Only with the right partners, skills and tools will we keep the zombies at bay.

Link to The St. Petersburg Times - Top Stories - Estonian Claims Kremlin Behind Attacks on Web Sites

Link to Scotland Warned of attack by Zombies