Russia may be fucking with Estonia, as it plays with Condi-lies-a lot

Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia

Ian Traynor in Brussels

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.
While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.

While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.

If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.

Relations between the Kremlin and the west are at their worst for years, with Russia engaged in bitter disputes not only with Estonia, but with Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Georgia - all former parts of the Soviet Union or ex-members of the Warsaw Pact. The electronic offensive is making matters much worse.

"Frankly it is clear that what happened in Estonia in the cyber-attacks is not acceptable and a very serious disturbance," said a senior EU official.

Estonia's president, foreign minister, and defence minister have all raised the emergency with their counterparts in Europe and with Nato.

"At present, Nato does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words collective self-defence, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country," said the Estonian defence minister, Jaak Aaviksoo.

"Not a single Nato defence minister would define a cyber-attack as a clear military action at present. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future."

Estonia, a country of 1.4 million people, including a large ethnic Russian minority, is one of the most wired societies in Europe and a pioneer in the development of "e-government". Being highly dependent on computers, it is also highly vulnerable to cyber-attack.

The main targets have been the websites of:

· the Estonian presidency and its parliament

· almost all of the country's government ministries

· political parties

· three of the country's six big news organisations

· two of the biggest banks; and firms specializing in communications

It is not clear how great the damage has been.

With their reputation for electronic prowess, the Estonians have been quick to marshal their defences, mainly by closing down the sites under attack to foreign internet addresses, in order to try to keep them accessible to domestic users.

The cyber-attacks were clearly prompted by the Estonians' relocation of the Soviet second world war memorial on April 27.

Ethnic Russians staged protests against the removal, during which 1,300 people were arrested, 100 people were injured, and one person was killed.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.

"The cyber-attacks are from Russia. There is no question. It's political," said Merit Kopli, editor of Postimees, one of the two main newspapers in Estonia, whose website has been targeted and has been inaccessible to international visitors for a week. It was still unavailable last night.

"If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it's a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere," Russia's ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, said in reply to a question from the Guardian. He added: "I don't support such behaviour, but one has to look at where they [the attacks] came from and why."

Without naming Russia, the Nato official said: "I won't point fingers. But these were not things done by a few individuals.

"This clearly bore the hallmarks of something concerted. The Estonians are not alone with this problem. It really is a serious issue for the alliance as a whole."

Mr Chizhov went on to accuse the EU of hypocrisy in its support for Estonia, an EU and Nato member. "There is a smell of double standards."

He also accused Poland of holding the EU hostage in its dealings with Russia, and further accused Estonia and other east European countries previously in Russia's orbit of being in thrall to "phantom pains of the past, historic grievances against the Soviet union and the Russian empire of the 19th century." In Tallinn, Ms Kopli said: "This is the first time this has happened, and it is very important that we've had this type of attack. We've been able to learn from it."

"We have been lucky to survive this," said Mikko Maddis, Estonia's defence ministry spokesman. "People started to fight a cyber-war against it right away. Ways were found to eliminate the attacker."

The attacks have come in three waves: from April 27, when the Bronze Soldier riots erupted, peaking around May 3; then on May 8 and 9 - a couple of the most celebrated dates in the Russian calendar, when the country marks Victory Day over Nazi Germany, and when President Vladimir Putin delivered another hostile speech attacking Estonia and indirectly likening the Bush administration to the Hitler regime; and again this week.

Estonian officials say that one of the masterminds of the cyber-campaign, identified from his online name, is connected to the Russian security service. A 19-year-old was arrested in Tallinn at the weekend for his alleged involvement.

Expert opinion is divided on whether the identity of the cyber-warriors can be ascertained properly.

Experts from Nato member states and from the alliance's NCSA unit - "Nato's first line of defence against cyber-terrorism", set up five years ago - were meeting in Seattle in the US when the crisis erupted. A couple of them were rushed to Tallinn.

Another Nato official familiar with the experts' work said it was easy for them, with other organisations and internet providers, to track, trace, and identify the attackers.

But Mikko Hyppoenen, a Finnish expert, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that it would be difficult to prove the Russian state's responsibility, and that the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to.

Original article posted here.

Russia flexes muscles in response to U.S. missile defense system

By Behnam Elmi

Over the past 15 years, Russia’s response to important international issues has sometimes diverged from its official position, especially at sensitive junctures. Due to this inconsistency, the international community seems somewhat wary of Russian foreign policy.

Russia’s opposition to the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the incorporation of the Baltic republics into NATO, the Kosovo crisis, NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia, and finally, the U.S. invasion of Iraq reinforce the hypothesis that Russia is unable to efficiently confront U.S. policy and that the U.S. will prevail in any new confrontation.

Now the question arises as to whether Russia will be able to prevent the establishment of the U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe or will simply adapt to the new situation.

This can be best answered by studying Russia’s actions in the international arena since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, socialist ideology no longer held sway over Russian policies. From that time on, Russia began to acknowledge the realities of the world and adopted a pragmatic approach in place of its former ideological inclinations.

Although this approach has not changed over the past 16 years, there has been a metamorphosis in the Russians’ conception of national security.

Under Yeltsin, the Russians believed that they had no major enemies in the world and regarded the West as an honest partner in efforts to develop the country and address its shortcomings. The plan for a security space stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok proposed by then foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev is a clear example of this trend in Moscow’s foreign policy.

However, the increasing tension between Russia and the former Soviet republics, the escalation of the ethnic crisis in the Russian Federation, the former Warsaw Pact countries’ inclination to join NATO, and Russia’s economic depression led Moscow to devise a new, more realistic definition of national security, as represented in the 1993 military doctrine.

According to this doctrine, the entry of foreign forces into neighboring countries is considered a threat.

The country’s vulnerability and the economic depression later caused Russia to formulate another security policy. Wary of the U.S., Moscow prepared a new document in 1997 in which it called for the establishment of a European-Atlantic system for Europe’s security led by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

The West rejected Russia’s proposals for security in Europe and Asia because the U.S. had another idea on international security and sought to implement another mechanism.

From the U.S. point of view, the eastward expansion of NATO is the major mechanism for ensuring the security of Europe and the Atlantic, and Washington alone is responsible for maintaining the security of Japan and Southeast Asia.

Due to the failure to reach a consensus with the West, Russia began to view the international atmosphere as dangerous and decided to rely on its own national capacity to ward off threats.

As an upshot of this new attitude, Moscow drafted a new military doctrine in 2000, which stated that it is necessary to maintain an appropriate level of military might as a deterrent to the West.

During the ongoing missile defense system crisis, Russia has not declared military confrontation as its goal but has emphasized the need to adopt a robust military posture to counter the missile system threat.

In addition, in response to the United States’ new space-based ballistic missile surveillance system project, Russia has devised a plan for a surveillance system consisting of 24 satellites, which would be completed by 2009.

Russia will most likely try to avoid a confrontation. Rather, Moscow will probably only improve the components of its national security system and ensure that its missiles are capable of destroying U.S. missiles.

Original article posted here.