According to an article from Rueters (http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/technologyNews\/idUSTRE52B4D820090313?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0), Konstantin Goloskokov, a member of a Russian youth movement recently claimed responsibility to organizing a group of fellow supporters and executing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonian internet sites, causing them to crash, approximately 2 years ago. The attack was allegedly in response to the Estonian government’s movement to dismantle a WW2 soviet army monument.<\/p>\n
The event brings up the interesting topic of cyber-warfare.\u00a0 Though Goloskokov claimed that he had no support whatsoever fro m the youth group or the Russian government, and both the group and government deny involvement, it doesn’t seem too unlikely that attacks on internet infrastructure will become a major part of modern warfare (and in many cases, it probably already is). \u00a0 As the world relies on the internet increasingly more to do its everyday business, an attack on websites used by the government or major corporations in that country could cause significant damages.\u00a0 In this case, the Estonian web sites were probably very poorly equipped to handle large amounts of traffic, as a group of friends was able to shut them down, but security measures must be put in place because DDoS attacks by large botnets could be much more difficult to handle.<\/p>\n
It appears measures could have been made to prevent this attack, as Goloskokov claims that each individual made multiple requests to websites, so checking for an excessive number of connections from a single IP address may have been able to help prevent the attack.\u00a0 One positive outcome of this attack was that it increased the awareness of NATO, among other agencies, to the threats presented by cyber-warfare, and the necessity of putting measures in place to thwart it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to an article from Rueters (http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/technologyNews\/idUSTRE52B4D820090313?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0), Konstantin Goloskokov, a member of a Russian youth movement recently claimed responsibility to organizing a group of fellow supporters and executing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonian internet sites, causing … Continue reading