Russians gov-t not the aggressor

Sep 28, 2007 14:29 GMT  ·  By

There was an online attack at the beginning of the year, against Estonia. It took down government servers. However, the Estonians got this matter fixed fast. They communicated, asked for help and things were solved. Since then, many suppositions have been made, some groundless, some with a little bit of evidence. In any case, a lot of people said that the attack was the handy work of the Russian government. But a recent statement that Senior researcher Sean Sullivan made for Vnunet proves things aren't always what they seem.

The researcher said that the hackers created some tools designed to damage government servers and spread the word online. It is easy to imagine that when all the evil hackers got their hands on these tools they were just dying to test them and an overwhelming attack took down the Estonian servers. So, you could say this is just a use of ingenuity, making other people do the dirty work for you and not even knowing that they're acting like servants. Furthermore, when you do something bad, you're just bad, but when you make another person do something bad, you're evil. So this just proves it that being tech-savvy won't get you anywhere - you have to be clever too, if you want to be a hacker.

Sean Sullivan, further declared, for the same site: "You do not need infrastructure for this. You just set up the tools and the mob will take care of the rest. Whether the [Russian] government was involved or not is irrelevant. It was the work of a flash mob that took down the servers." This just makes clear that web threats are evolving, but no one knows what they're heading towards. Who would have thought Estonia's case was possible? Let's just hope that with all the security measures evolving as well, such cases will never happen again.