The distributed denial of service attack that
took down Estonia was run by a bunch of kids, it has
emerged.
Two years ago, the former Soviet satellite found its banking and
government websites paralysed for several weeks by a distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The incident prompted a
massive reorganisation and upgrade of network security and
early warning systems among Nato members, and Nato even set up a
cyber-security research house in Estonia.
At the time Russia was suspected of orchestrating the attack,
but Moscow always denied it, and indeed Estonian officials never
accused the Kremlin directly.
Yesterday, Konstantin Goloskokov (22) claimed he and some
friends set up the attack to protest the removal of a Red Army
monument from a downtown site in Estonia's capital Tallinn. The
move had earlier led to rioting by pro-Soviet protesters.
Goloskokov told Reuters the attack was an act of civil
disobedience, and, therefore, completely legal. "I was not involved
in any cyber-attack," he said.
Goloskokov, a pro-Soviet activist, said he and his friends had
set up the botnet that overloaded Estonian websites, causing them
to crash.
"The fact that they could not withstand this is, strictly
speaking, the fault of those people who, from a technical point of
view, did not equip them properly," he told Reuters.