Home pagePress CenterIn the Media James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS, was quoted by The New York Times, "Backgrounder: The Evolution of Cyber Warfare."
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James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS, was quoted by The New York Times, "Backgrounder: The Evolution of Cyber Warfare."
In the spring of 2007, when Estonian authorities moved a monument to the Red Army from the center of its capital city, Tallinn, to the outskirts of town, a diplomatic row erupted with neighboring Russia. Estonian nationalists regard the army as occupiers and oppressors, a sentiment that dates to the long period of Soviet rule following the Second World War, when the Soviet Union absorbed all three Baltic states. Ethnic Russians, who make up about a quarter of Estonia’s 1.3 million people, were nonetheless incensed by the statue’s treatment and took to the streets in protest. Estonia later blamed Moscow for orchestrating the unrest; order was restored only after U.S. and European diplomatic interventions. But the story of the “Bronze Statue” did not end there. Days after the riots the computerized infrastructure of Estonia’s high-tech government began to fray, victimized by what experts in cybersecurity termed a coordinated “denial of service” attack. A flood of bogus requests for information from computers around the world conspired to cripple (Wired) the websites of Estonian banks, media outlets, and ministries for days. Estonia denounced the attacks as an unprovoked act of aggression from a regional foe (though experts still disagree on who perpetrated it—Moscow has denied any knowledge). Experts in cybersecurity went one step further: They called it the future of warfare. [...]
Other cyber tactics are less sophisticated. The attack that temporarily brought down Estonian networks began with a flood of bogus messages targeting government servers, called a “denial of service” attack. The approach harnesses “botnets”—massive networks of interconnected computers—to bombard targeted networks with information requests while masking the location of the primary attacker. James Lewis, a security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says hackers in the Estonia example likely took control of tens of thousands of computers around the world without the knowledge of their owners and directed them at the government’s servers. The result, he says, was a relatively minor attack that was nearly impossible to trace (PDF).
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