Wired Science

Europe's Most Wired Country Under Hacker Attack

Call it the first battle in a new era of cyber-warfare. Earlier this year, the entire country of Estonia was hit with a paralyzing attack on its Internet infrastructure that shut down the websites of government ministries, news organizations and major banks.

The tiny Baltic nation was hammered by a massive wave of what are called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In a DDoS attack, hackers use "botnets" - networks of surreptitiously commandeered "zombie" computers - to bombard a target website with bogus requests for information, overwhelming the host computer and forcing the site to shut down. Such attacks hit commercial websites all the time, and have been used for political ends before - but never on such a scale. Estonia is a particularly vulnerable target: It's the most wired country in Europe, one where citizens can do everything from paying parking tickets to voting for Parliament via the Internet.

Who was behind this digital siege? No one knows for sure, but a whole lot of evidence points to Russian nationalists furious at the Estonian government's plans to remove a Soviet war memorial from its honored place in Tallinn, the capital city. They may have been helped by Russian Internet security firms looking to make a point about the need for their services - and maybe even by the Russian government itself.

WIRED Science went to Estonia to find out how the attacks were launched, how they were beaten back - and what it all means for the rest of us. Check out the sidebar links to find out whether the US is vulnerable to a similar attack, what it might cost to rent a botnet if you were so inclined, and to see a timeline of the history of cyber assaults.