The Russian authorities have been accused of buying time on illegal botnets
to launch a
denial-of-service attack
against Estonia.
The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA), which comprises arms
groups and financial services companies, claims to have uncovered evidence of
alleged collusion between Russia and the botnet owners.
ATCA said that the botnets were only rented for a short period to boost the
number of attacking computers to over a million.
Russia has consistently denied any involvement in the attacks.
"The attackers used a giant network of enslaved computers on 9 May, perhaps
as many as one million in places as far away as North America and the Far East,
to amplify the impact of their assault," ATCA stated.
"In a sign of their financial resources, there is evidence that [Russia]
rented time from trans-national criminal syndicates on botnets.
"On 10 May, it appears that the attackers' time on the rented servers
expired, and the botnet attacks fell off abruptly."
ATCA claims that the denial-of-service attacks used very large packets of
information streams to clog government websites, banks and newspapers.
"The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It is political,"
said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia
which were targeted.
ATCA is suggesting setting up an international task force to monitor such
attacks and prevent them happening again. This would include online monitoring
but would have a physical arm to go after those coordinating the attacks.
"In the future, when seeking to protect the critical infrastructure
constituents and business digital systems at a national level, the economically
prudent way forward would be to combine knowledge management, analysis and count
er-attack tools with on-the-ground human intelligence sources," the group
stated.
"Surveillance and reconnaissance dashboards of digital systems would need to
be managed by experienced counter-attack forces on a 24/7 basis. As in all wars,
our collective national defences must excel enemy aggression."
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