Cyberwar

February 11th, 2009 by Gene

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It’s a new kind of war. Fighting with bits and bytes instead of bullets and bombs — cyberwar, today on Engineering Works!

The tiny Baltic country of Estonia seems to be the first battlefield in this new kind of war. Computer engineers and security experts have worried about cyberwar for years. But nobody had ever started one — until now.

This war started when computers in Russia and around the world started flooding Estonian computer networks with data. So much data that many of them crashed. Imagine everything in Microsoft’s newest operating system downloaded onto your system, every six seconds — for 10 hours.

The attack almost shut down Estonia’s digital infrastructure. That’s saying something. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world. People there use the internet for everything — vote, pay taxes, shop, pay for parking.

The president and prime minister’s web sites crashed. So did computer systems at the parliament and other government departments. It was a near thing for the country’s biggest bank.
Good computer security and emergency planning seems to have saved Estonia from being shut down by this cyber attack, but security experts are worried about the next time.

What started the war? If you’re not Estonian or Russian, it seems pretty silly and we’re not going to go into it here. The Estonians say the Russians did it. The Russians say they didn’t. We don’t really care.

Nobody’s attacking our system, but we’re still out of data. See you next time.

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