Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

18 2. POLITICAL CYBER ATTACK COMES OF AGE IN 2007FIGURE 2.2 Toompea Castle in the upper town of Tallinn is the home of the Estonian Parliament. A Denialof Service attack in April 2007 caused the Parliament’s e-mail servers to become unavailable, delaying the Estoniangovernment’s response to countrywide cyber attacks at the time. Source: CIA World Fact Book.Some hackers were able to compromise the security of the Web servers of Estonian politicalparties. They used their new access to these servers to deface them, replacing legitimate contentprovided by the government with content mocking the government. One such defacementadded a moustache to a picture of the prime minister. Another placed a falseapology letter from the prime minister.The Estonian Government’s ResponseIn the face of a massive and distributed denial of service attack, options are generally limited.Some Internet service providers offer a “DDoS protection” service or plan; however, efficacyof these services can be limited. In the face of a single remote host sending largeamounts of data, an effective mitigation would be to stop talking to the host. Two complicatingfactors in the presence of a distributed denial of service attack are, firstly, the attackingcomputers will be numerous and will change over time, and secondly, the source addresses(IP addresses) of the attacking computers can be forged. 13A denial of service attack can lead to panic and confusion among IT staff, so a criticalelement of the reaction to a denial of service attack is a swift and meaningful response byIT security. The Estonian government had a very capable computer emergency response team(CERT) that was able to both identify that an attack was taking place against their infrastructureand mobilize experts to help counter the attacks. 14