DDoS Fines in Estonia
by Jose NazarioLast spring’s DDoS attacks against Estonia continue to play out. First, just a week or so ago an Estonian new site was hit with a sustained DDoS from a botnet. And today, news that an Estonian citizen was fined for his role in the DDoS attacks last spring:
Authorities in Estonia fined a 20-year-old Tallinn resident for participating in cyber attacks on government servers, paralyzing them during the spring riots in the capital, local media reported on Wednesday. A county court in Tallinn fined Dmitri Galushkevich 17,500 Estonian kroons (1,118 euros), an amount equal to a minimum daily wage for 350 days, for computer sabotage and attacking the Web site of the Reform Party of Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.
Source: Estonian court fines a man accused of cyber attacks last year, via EarthTimes Wed, 23 Jan 2008.
This likely isn’t everything, but it’s a start, and a welcome sight to seeing online attackers brought to justice.
Edited on Jan 25 to add more coverage of this issue.
- Student behind DoS attack that rekindled bad Soviet memories, from Ars Technica
- Estonia convicts first ‘cyber-war’ hacker: prosecutors, from AFP via Yahoo! Canada
- ‘We Traced the Cyberwar — It’s Coming From Inside the Country!’, from the Wired network security blog. Note that we were contacted and provided some data for the original story that ran in Wired. We were careful to not point the finger at anyone or any country, as the data we had could not substantiate any finger pointing to people or groups beyond a few online IPs and identities.
[...] The removal of monuments to Soviet soldiers and the excavation of World War II Red Army graves sparked riots on the street that spilled over onto the net. Sporadic attacks thought to be motivated by the same factors continue. Earlier this month an Estonian news site was hit with a sustained DDoS from a botnet, security tools firm Arbor Networks reports. [...]