In the year 2007, cyber crooks took advantage of the political unrest to unleash world’s first major coordinated cyberattack on the critical infrastructure of Estonia. And as a result of this cyber espionage, digital assets of many banks, media, the police and government departments went disrupted for many days. The attacks were carried out through bots, coordinated distributed denial of service and spam which resulted in immense financial damage to the nation.
The details causing this cyber attacks are as follows- On April 27th,2007 i.e. exactly before 10 years, the Government of Estonia decided to move a bronze statue of “ Soldier of Tallinn” for reasons. The statue which commemorated the Soviet Army of the World War II was tactically moved from the center of the city to a military cemetery located on Tallinn’s outskirts.
This led to a strong commotion from the Russian-speaking populace which led to more than 1400 arrests and 100 injuries and one death- all as per official record. The disturbance was caused at the night time and so it was named as ‘Bronze Night’.
In retaliation of this activity by the Estonia government, a group of hackers naming themselves as “Russian Supporters” launched a cyber attack on thousands of computers which lasted for almost 3 weeks or 21 days.
A cyber attack surge peaked on May 9 which is celebrated as a ‘Victory Day’ by Moscow. The attack was so intense that it brought the entire digital reliant society of Estonia to a grinding halt.
After this cyber disaster, NATO responded and brought in a Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence in Estonia in 2010. The contribution center then brought in a publication of the Tallinn Manual in 2013 which lined outlaws related to international cyber conflicts. The purpose of this manual was to mitigate the risks of cyber attacks that amount to acts of war and disable them on a permanent note.
Going forward, Tallinn 2.0 was released in February 2017 which divulged info on how the world has changed in the cyberspace since Bronze Night.
Now, on doing retrospection, we can come to a conclusion that nothing much has changed after the Estonian cyberattack. Nations are still launching cyber attacks on each other causing immense trouble to public and private entities. And there exists no fear of being punished among those who have developed cyber armies on launching cyber attacks.
In today’s world, nations are funding cyber armies to spy into other nation’s political, military and financial activities and are also launching cyber attacks without any alert. And all this is being done to gain meager political mileage in their own nation and also in the international markets.
We can take Russia for instance on this note as it launched cyber attacks on US 2016 Presidential Elections to assure the current US President Donald Trump win. Maybe Mr. Putin was trying to re-establish the worn-out relationship between US and Russia by helping the US Presidential Probable Donald Trump who was known to be in favor of doing so.
So, what’s your say…?
Have any suggestions on how to curb such cyber threats on a permanent note?
Please share your mind through the comments section below.
