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Brave
New Warfare
Russian
hackers bring Estonia to it’s cyber knees
By Michael Weiss
Last
May, Estonia was invaded. Rather than tanks and aircraft,
the medium of trespass was fiber optic cables—which is nearly
as bad, for such a wired country. The “cyberwar,” which was
precipitated by the controversial relocation of a World War
II monument in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, drew international
headlines, mainly focused on the Clancy-esque gizmology behind
it. “Distributed-denial-of-service” has now entered the lexicon
not as a symptom of disaffected Baltic waiters, but as a means
of bringing down a country with spam. NATO, which used to
only contend with enemy garrisons and missile silos on European
soil, now finds itself dispatching allied geek squads to protect
against that 21st century species of automaton: the “botnet.”
The U.S. has announced plans to form its own “Cyber Command,”
a kind of digital NORAD, to better prepare key levels of state
and economic infrastructure against foreign hackers. Yet lost
in all the bit-rate analysis of Estonia’s springtime troubles
was any discussion of how the unconventional siege conventionally
violated a nation’s sovereignty, not to mention its citizens’
human rights.
With a tiny population of 1.4 million, Estonia is almost entirely
run on computers. The land that helped develop the free VOIP
and instant messenger program Skype hosts wireless zones not
just on cafe-lined streets, but in gas stations and remote
national parks. Estonians bank, vote and pay their taxes online
through digital identity cards that are scanned by easy insertion
into slots in their laptops, devices that the country’s “paperless”
government uses to conduct cabinet meetings and draft legislation.
Indeed, so proud was Estonia of its commitment to broadband
efficiency—and the web’s concomitant freedom of information—that
its parliament passed a law in 2000 declaring Internet access
a basic human right.
Symbolic though the law might be, it is still the product
of a representative democracy in a sovereign EU-member nation.
A coordinated attack on Estonia’s digital infrastructure is
therefore not just a “national security situation,” as Defense
Minister Jaak Aaviksoo rightly put it, but also a cause for
the United Nations Human Rights Council and Amnesty International.
Both organizations have yet to comment on the Estonian cyberwar,
although a spokesperson from Amnesty International said a
statement is in the works. She had no idea, though, that Estonia
even considered Internet access a human right.
In a sense, the trouble began over human rights, at least
as they are defined by cold war historiographers. In April,
the Estonian government decided, after much internal debate,
to relocate the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Cast as a solemn,
head-lowered “Ivan” of World War II, the statue was actually
the centerpiece of an oddly placed urban sepulcher for the
remains of nameless Red Army soldiers who died in the “liberation”
of Estonia from Nazi occupation. Unveiled in 1947 by the returning
Soviet occupiers, who had been kicked out by the Nazis, the
Bronze Soldier was met with mixed feelings by ethnic Estonians,
who were then subjected to half a century of Russian rule,
under which a tenth of the population was deported to the
gulag.
Nevertheless, many patriotic Estonians remember that 11,000
of their compatriots, forcibly drafted into the Red Army,
died fighting Hitler. Adding to the anger and frustration
the Estonian man-in-the-street must have felt toward the statue,
Stalin and Hitler had haggled over Baltic states in their
notorious prewar negotiations, which culminated in the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact. In liberating Estonia, the USSR was more expelling its
former competitor for imperial real estate than doing much
for Estonians.
It’s important to see the Bronze Solider for what it really
was: imperialist propaganda, not a solemn consecration of
war dead. The USSR loved to establish ad hoc burial grounds
in the most visible locations of their occupied cities. The
one in Tallinn, situated in the center of Tõnismägi Hill,
was dubbed “Liberators’ Square”—communist reliquary construction
at its finest. Even before Estonia gained independence in
1991, the Kremlin satraps who ran the country hardly abided
by their own catechism for glorifying the motherland. They
built a bus station and a busy intersection directly on Tõnismägi
Hill, turning it into an accessible rallying point for Russian
extremists, the sort responsible for the two days of rioting
that engulfed Tallinn in late April and in which 100 people
were injured and one person killed.
These lumpen elements are mainly members of the nationalist
Nashi (“Ours”) movement, which is headquartered in Moscow
and suborned by the Vladimir Putin regime. The Russian president
may now describe himself as the only “absolute, pure democrat”
on the planet, but that doesn’t mean he’ll stop Nashi thugs
from attacking the Estonian ambassador in Moscow, even though
he’s bound by the Vienna Convention to do so. To give some
indication of just how upset Moscow gets when threatened with
the tampering of its Stalinist legacy, the Russian Federation
Council passed a resolution in January calling the imminent
relocation of the Bronze Solider “an attempt to legalize fascism.”
That Russians are once more resorting to Popular Front rhetoric
is characteristic, but also ironic given that Estonia’s relocation
of the Bronze Statue was actually undertaken with great care
and sensitivity, and included the long-awaited identification
of the Red Army fallen by DNA testing. Russia’s “unknown”
soldiers are known at last, and will this month be re-interred
in the cemetery of the Estonian Defense Forces. This is all
of a piece with Estonia’s passage of the War Graves Protection
Act in January 2007, designed to align the nation’s standard
for honoring of military victims with the Geneva Conventions.
No NGO or supranational body has objected to the Bronze Soldier’s
transplantation; only the Russian government has.
Whether or not the Kremlin is behind the violation is almost
beside the point, although it is curious that the cyber-attacks
peaked on May 8 and 9, the calendar dates marking the Red
Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht. Some Estonians I’ve talked
to are of the opinion that if Moscow was in fact responsible,
then this was only a trial run to gauge efficacy. The Bronze
Soldier might well have been a convenient pretext for staging
an elaborate war game.
The method and organization of the attacks suggest that the
perpetrators had national paralysis in mind. They targeted
nearly all the Estonian ministries; two major banks (one of
which, Hansabank, had to be shut down for more than an hour,
at an expense of at least $1 million); the website of the
Reform Party, which was forced to host a forged letter of
apology for the statue scandal claiming to be from the Estonian
Prime Minister Andrus Ansip; and three of the six largest
Estonian news organizations.
It’s true that the “zombies,” or infiltrated computers used
to clog Estonian websites, were traced to places like Canada,
Brazil and Vietnam. But a number also led straight into the
offices of Kremlin and other Russian agencies—not easy silicon
curtains to penetrate, even for the most enterprising hacker.
So either Moscow was an accomplice in the criminality of its
international sympathizers, or it should start worrying about
the security of its own network. This isn’t likely to happen.
Russian officials refused to comply with early requests to
help trace IP addresses of any cyber-blitzers who might have
been piggybacking off Russian servers. At the very minimum,
then, the Putin regime is guilty of benign neglect.
In a 2003 Military Review article addressing the proliferation
of cyberwarfare—particularly as it has been waged between
Israeli and Palestinian hackers—authors Patrick D. Allen and
Chris C. Demchak shrewdly compared the phenomenon to the Spanish
Civil War. In both instances, far-flung civilian volunteers
were called into action—or “horizontally escalated”—through
the use of targeted propaganda. (Russian language instructions
explaining how and when to infiltrate Estonian systems were
posted all over the web in the days leading up to the first
sortie.) State sponsorship was plausibly deniable: If the
Comintern could control the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, what’s
to stop a government from either openly or covertly corralling
citizen “hacktivists” to do its dirty work? Most ominous of
all, the event may be taken as a prelude to a later and more
devastating assault, involving a greater number of players.
Pentagon computers had sensitive information pilfered from
them by Russian computers in 2003 during a cyber-attack known
as “Moonlight Maze.” And in 1999, during an operation dubbed
“Titan Rain,” Chinese hackers broke into systems at Lockheed
Martin, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA under similar motives of
military espionage. Yet international law has yet to catch
up with technology. According to Allen and Demchak:
“Criminal
punishment is particularly difficult when the hackers operate
from a blatantly hostile nation. However, nations have certain
rights under an internationally recognized protective principle
if offending nations are not helpful. There is international
case law, albeit limited, that might support state action
in response to cyber attacks. Under this principle, when a
person from country A harms country B, and country A does
not prevent that person from continuing to do harm, then country
B has the right to take action against country A . . . Although
this principle has not yet been applied in cyberwar cases,
the legal precedence exists.”
The 19th-century Russian revolutionary Tolstoy once described
the Tsarist system as “Ghengis Khan with a telegraph.” Given
the communications conquest of recent times, cyber warfare
is almost certainly going to be a continuing threat. The West
should start laying the groundwork to deal with coordinated,
state-sponsored cyber attacks before they happen again, and
on a larger scale.
Michael
Weiss is an associate editor of Jewcy. This article
first appeared at Reason.com. Source: Featurewell.com.
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