Cyber assaults cripple Estonia’s e-topia

When the Estonian government decided to move a statue honouring Russian war dead last month they had no idea where the move designed to tweak the tail of the Russian tiger would lead. After clashes on the streets of the capital Tallinn that left one dead and scores injured, and brought a stern rebuke from Vladimir Putin, a more sinister and modern retaliation began.

The first signs that something was wrong occurred when a false message seeking forgiveness for the statue's move and a promise to reverse the decision appeared on the ruling Reform Party's website. Now, three weeks later, a stream of systematic cyber-attacks has crippled the infrastructure of the small EU state and given the West a vision of a worrying technological future.

It's all the more worrying because Estonia is a country that has

reinvented itself in the Utopian image of a 21st Century 'paperless' state. Its government departments, banking and voting systems were all designed to be accessed online. Broadband is ubiquitous, and 80 per cent of Estonians use the Internet to file their tax returns and pay their bills. Or, rather, they did until the Estonian state, banking and even school websites were effectively shut down by a sustained and malicious cyber-attack.

Until the first wave of attacks hit home, political cyber-terrorism (rather than merely cyber-terrorism for fun and profit) was still the stuff of science fiction. In reality, it arrived in the form of a crude but effective Denial of Service (DoS) attack, in which a network of infected computers smother a website with simultaneous requests. The resultant traffic jam can bring a server (the computer which hosts the site) to