DDoStonia

May 17, 2007

DDoStonia

While interesting, the coverage of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonia's web and internet servers (I was wondering why the Postimees website was down for the last two weeks) leaves out some pretty important technical explanations. Like the fact that a distributed DoS campaign works by a person or group taking control of thousands of vulnerable Windows PCs and using them to attack one server at the same time.

While it could have been the Russian government behind the (the quotes makes officials sound coy about straight out denying it), the fact that some of the computers used in the attack were inside the Russian government doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that. In fact, if it were the Russian government, they would have no trouble keeping Russian computers out of the attack.

If NATO has in fact traced the computers controlled the compromised boxes back to Russian government offices, then that's another story, but it doesn't seem that anyone is saying that.

The interesting thing will be to see where else DDoS attacks against entire countries show up, and coincide with the foreign policy goals of other powers.