War, web style
Evolution of a cyber-battlefield
BY Terence Dick
Illustration by Dave Donald
Law professor and cyberspace legal expert David Post says the First Internet War was waged by Scientologists against their critics in 1991. While the skirmishes, major and minor, between the sci-fi religion and its debunkers were not much more than a particularly aggressive debate, the weapons wielded have since become standard. These tools include spamming (the email equivalent of carpet bombing), “kill files” (the anti-aircraft response) and “cancelbots” (erasing messages from opposing netizens).
As a field of combat, the “war” was largely symbolic; the opposing sides disrupted each other’s communications, making life difficult but never threatening lives in any way. That would come later.
Wired magazine called the Kosovo conflict in the former Yugoslavia the First Internet War, but the context was about broadcast rather than battleground—the Vietnam War (First Television War), jumps to the Gulf War (First 24-Hour Cable News Network War), before landing somewhere near the present. This assessment has more to do with propaganda than the active use (or misuse) of the internet in the actual conflict.
Then there are others who consider the war in Sri Lanka the First Internet War, and others still who have given that title to the current war in Iraq. The most recent and—dare I say it?—final First Internet War took place this spring, and represented what might be considered the first real Internet War. The Estonian battle was different. This time, an entire country’s computer system was attacked by (self-proclaimed) representatives of another nation and defended by an international coalition of the cyber-willing.
The three-week war started when the government of Estonia decided to move a statue of a Second World War-era Soviet soldier from a park in the state capital, Tallinn, to a remote military graveyard. Miffed Russians both in and outside Estonia responded by consolidating forces on Russo-philic web forums, passing around information on how to create a “data flood” to shut down the tiny Northern European republic’s computer networks. The idea was to destabilize the country, as Estonians use the internet for everything from voting and paying taxes to banking and shopping.
On April 26, an onslaught of data (in the form of email requests) began to hit the websites of parliament, the president and the prime minister. On April 30, the websites of a number of daily newspapers were overwhelmed and forced to shut down. Early in May, an international defence team of computer experts, law enforcement agencies and government officials began to identify and block the addresses from which the mail was coming. Computers in Russia were identified as the source, though these weren’t necessarily the perpetrators.
The unfriendly forces were using botnets to launch distributed denial of service attacks, sending large masses of email from hijacked computers to vital services with the aim of slowing or shutting them down. The Russian holiday Victory Day falls on May 9 and Estonian officials expected it to be the apex of the war. That day, zombie computers across the globe were used to increase the amount of information being sent to Estonia. Hansabank, Estonia’s biggest financial institution, had its online banking network shut down.
The war was essentially over by mid-May and the news of it made a small dent in the international section of some Canadian newspapers. If you don’t pay attention to this sort of thing, it would have barely registered—but it should have. A precedent has been set for a new kind of warfare that doesn’t cause infrastructural damage or injury, but, as internet security expert Gadi Evron observes, targets civilians (not the military) by disrupting communication systems.
As with the Scientologists and their critics, information is the target, but what has changed in the intervening years is our reliance on the internet, with information and money increasingly synonymous. Where internet battles 15 years ago were minor, local annoyances, today they can threaten to destabilize entire economies. What happens online is no longer symbolic— it is real, and just as entrepreneurs can make a mint selling real estate on Second Life, we can lose our shirts when our bank’s e-commerce is shut down. No guns required.
