Estonian Cyber Defence Hub Set Up

w1z4rd writes "The BBC reports that seven Nato nations have backed a new cyber defence centre in Estonia, which last year blamed Russia for weeks of attacks on its internet structure. The US will initially send an observer to the project, which will have some 30 staff when fully operational in August."

Obligatory:

Did anyone else read that as "Elbonia" when they first read it? I was picturing an ungodly amalgamation of mud, wooden slingshots, 286s, and farm animals...

Re:Obligatory. (Borat edt.)

Borat: My computer, it is dead!

Victim: That's terrible!

Borat: No, is OK. My friend Igor give me 386 for massage with, how you say, happy finish.

Re:Obligatory:

No, because I can read.

Re:Estonia

Russian propaganda has got you nevertheless... The exaggerated glaims by Russia which are fed to their public are very hypocritical considering the facism, neonazism, racism, putinjugend [wikipedia.org] and human rights violations present in Russia.

I'd say its not Estonia playing up, but Russia, whose people still worship the old Soviet Nation. Can you believe they actually believe the soviets "liberated" Estonia in World War II? But estonians still very well remember the mass deportations and silent genocide conducted by the KGB.

As for present-day Russia - they're cocky again and are looking to rule over neighbouring nations. The false information they're planting into the minds of their citizens clearly indicates they are hostile toward other nations. It's definately a global threat!

Re:Estonia

You anonymous coward! Need I remind you the soviets had already conquered Estonia by the time the nazis came? Therefore the nazis were at first seen by many as someone to liberate us from the soviet rule which had oppressed us by then already. Estonians just wanted to have their free country, not to be under russian influence. Nazism as an ideology was not supported! Estonians remember the crimes of nazis in Estonia, but the crimes soviet russia did in Estonia during and after the war are by far greater in number and extent.

Estonia commemorates all estonians that fought for the freedom of Estonia. We fought alongside germany when the soviets conquered us, and we fought alongside russia when nazis conquered us. We supported neither ideology, all we ever wanted is a free country and peace. Both nazis and soviets tried to enslave us, russia succeeded for a short while. As far as most estonians are concerned the nazis and the soviets were not much different. Both were ruthless tyrants towards Estonia, "pigs" if you like. Russia still appears to be a tyrant nation as indicated by its foreign policies.

Russia, for God's sake, leave us be! We're no match for your military - please stop bullying us.

Re:

Because I think Russia (and a lot of other places) use the argument "if country X is a bastard, then I can be one too". It's a stupid argument, and Russia and the US should defend their own actions without referring to others.

As far as this issue goes, I

What happen ?

Somebody set up us the hub!

Re:

It's a wicked hub. 3-Com 8-port hub with a sticker: "Da Fence!" on it.

NATO ? Russia ?

Doesn't sound at all like another attempt by NATO to encroach upon what Russia considers her former sphere of influence. Not at all.

It's not like I'm some sort of advocate of Russian politics, but someone inside NATO must have a clue about these things an

Re:NATO ? Russia ?

Estonians have always rejected Russian interference in their affairs.

Re:NATO ? Russia ?

Well, Estonia is an independent nation and a member of NATO - how much more "encroachment" can this be?

And if you ask me, the rest of the world pays far too much attention to Russian whining about the lost glories of their empire as it is. The Russian government deliberately and systematically attacked Estonia's infrastructure last year - now NATO should place the defence hub somewhere else so as to be sensitive to Russian feelings? Ridiculous.

Re:NATO ? Russia ?

"The Russian government deliberately and systematically attacked Estonia's infrastructure last year"

This is of course pure bullshit (tm). And yes, I am Estonian too and know quite a bit about this "attack". Essentially some pissed of guys bought DDoS against some Estonian websites (mainly media and some government) and that was it. There were nothing special in this DDoS, just http queries coming from host of usual suspects (countries with lax security & no ISP filtering of bad traffic) - no notable traffic from Russia.
Of course the DDoS was bad in our context, our 100mbit line was something like 98-99% full and only upstream filters at ISP managed to block it. But was it cyberwar by Russia? Hardly.

Obvious Foreshadowing

I think this is evidence of a trend towards international organizations to create divisions or authorities responsible for cyber governance/monitoring/standardization/accountability.

I am keeping my eyes peeled for a new division/center [news.com] in the UN [un.org] for cyberspace soon.

Interesting, but really needed?

Being an Estonian I can say that the so called attacks weren't really such a big deal. Basically a few government web pages (parliament's, government's president's and couple more) were DDOS'ed for a couple of hours from Russian ips. It's not like this caused too much trouble (the government's infranet still worked just fine, the citizens just couldn't access the pages). I do think that the idea of Cyber Defence is quite cool and I'm glad, that we're the pioneers here but it does seem that this really is the primary reason here, to pioneer something. It might still become useful one day and I'll be interested to see how this rolls out. I do enjoy the fact that the small size of Estonia allows us to try all the new IT solutions on quite a large scale very fast. So far we've done quite well and I hope that we can do something revolutionary on the international scale as well. The IT innovation part of Estonia is really something I'm proud of.

Re:

I do think that the idea of Cyber Defence is quite cool and I'm glad, that we're the pioneers here but it does seem that this really is the primary reason here, to pioneer something. It might still become useful one day and I'll be interested to see how this rolls out.

New? Pioneers? Morris worm was launched, and defeated by co-operating sysadmins and programmers in 1988, 20 years ago. CERT [cert.org] was founded in the same year. Bugtraq mailing list [seclists.org] is operating since 1993. CVE [mitre.org] exists since 1999. And those are organizations that

What?!

They'll never defend anything with a hub. At the very least they should get a router. ~

At first, they should grow up

Estonians should get real and find the ways to cooperate with Russia, not to pretend that Russia does not exist. You just can't deliberately ignore a 100 mln people living next to you, not to mention enraging them. You should account for their feelings when making political decisions.

And that does not mean that Estonia should give up its sovereignty. You just cannot be totally independent from your neighbours. Estonia is no island.

Re:At first, they should grow up

Estonians should get real and find the ways to cooperate with Russia, not to pretend that Russia does not exist.

Being a member of the EU now, Estonia must answer to its fellow EU members when it formulates foreign policy decisions. If Estonia makes a decision that could in any way weaken Estonia, it weakens the EU.

You just can't deliberately ignore a 100 mln people living next to you

Based on current trends, Russia's present population doesn't necessarily serve as an argument that it is a major player worth taking into account. The birthrate of ethnic Russians is going down quickly, the birthrate of minorities (many of which, like the Finno-Ugrian Mari, support Estonia against Moscow) is going up, not to mention the huge presence of Chinese squatters all over the Russian Far East. Russia is going from a big, strong important nation to one very close to being torn apart. That's why a lot of people think bullying Estonia and trying to re-establish a sphere of influence is a sign of desperation.

So the pertinent questions is...

Why is it that whenever I read about nationwide, concerted, coordinated and serious efforts related to IT security, the USA is never mentioned?

Sure, we've got the airforce doing this and some twig of the FBI doing that, but where's the real commitment to security? Where's the offensive capability and overwhelming manpower the Chinese supposedly have? Where's the planning that seems to be happening in Europe? We're sending an "observer" -- WTF?

I'd love to believe we're just smarter about it. What's the point of broadcasting you have attack power on something as covert as IT -- in peacetime? But somehow I doubt it.

NSA is near god-like in terms of technical prowess; does anybody think we're utilizing it like we should?

Propaganda: Disgruntled Youth or Evil Russians?

Security guru Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram [schneier.com] newsletter has a good blurb on this issue and the topic of whether this was some disgruntled Estonian youths or was the "evil Russian gov't" that was responsible for the attacks.

Re:bummer

I work for the Department of Disinformation and Psychological Warfare at Microsoft. Sounded cool when I applied but I just spend all my time trolling slashdot and submitting bits of Windows source code to ReactOS.

Re:

If you get to +5 it would terribly reflect on your performance rating...

Re:Estonia, estonia...

Seriously dude, the article is 8 short paragraphs. Try reading them next time before looking like an idiot.

The centre will provide research, consultation and training on the development of cyber defences for participating national governments.

This is a training ground. Not a bunker with a bunch of geeks waiting for someone to DDoS them so they can unleash hell on them.

I'm guessing their websites cater mostly to Estonians which basically means they consistently failed to take scaling into account. Estonia doesn't need a Cyber Defence Hub. Just a bit of common sense.

Thats just stupid. Since nearly every single bank user in Estonia uses online banking and since there are a million different services provided online by the government the servers have been setup with scaling in mind. That 1.3 million will hit the tax website on the first day that you can file you taxes (yes, we do all our taxes online) and the server does just fine. Common sense is saying that they are doing things just fine with scaling.

Re:Blame Russia?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't those attacks eventually turn out to have nothing at all to do with Russia, being instead the work of a single person?

Here, I will do it since everyone on slashdot believes this even though in the original slashdot article that is cited when this is said says nothing of the sort. Dmitri Galushkevich was the guy who was fined. Somebody had to be hung, he was the only one to get caught. The Russian Youth leader idiot guy claims responsibility as well link [wikipedia.org] let alone the probability that there were others who joined in but who knew how to keep their mouth shut. When a bank is robbed by a group but only 1 person is caught, he was the sole perpetrator all of a sudden? The original article [arstechnica.com] even says:

Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, however, it's impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.

Oh and blaming Russia is a fairly safe bet here. You don't think the Russian Youth is funded through charity I hope. Also, the blockade of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow just magically had electricity and all the finer points of camping. And all the people who joined in the blockade just magically were able to quit their jobs for quite some time because it would be just unheard of if they had been paid to protest.

Re:

Yes, that story was reported someplaces. However the attacks took weeks, so the Kremlin had ample opportunity to act. Which it didn't. We heard this single person theory after the attacks. I'd say this whole things reeks of the Russian federal security ser