• Military
• WMD
• Intelligence

• Security Menu                     

• Systems
• Industry
• Operations
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Space

Backgrounder: The Evolution of Cyber Warfare

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Greg Bruno, Staff Writer

February 27, 2008

Introduction

In the spring of 2007, when Estonian authorities removed a monument to the Red Army from its capital city, Tallinn, a diplomatic row erupted with neighboring Russia. Estonian nationalists regard the army as occupiers and oppressors, a sentiment that dates to the long period of Soviet rule following the Second World War, when the Soviet Union absorbed all three Baltic states. Ethnic Russians, who make up about a quarter of Estonia’s 1.3 million people, were nonetheless incensed by the statue’s treatment and took to the streets in protest. Estonia later blamed Moscow for orchestrating the unrest; order was restored only after U.S. and European diplomatic interventions. But the story of the “Bronze Statue” did not end there. Days after the riots the computerized infrastructure of Estonia’s high-tech government began to fray, victimized by what experts in cybersecurity termed a coordinated “denial of service” attack. A flood of bogus requests for information from computers around the world conspired to cripple (Wired) the websites of Estonian banks, media outlets, and ministries for days. Estonia denounced the attacks as an unprovoked act of aggression from a regional foe (though experts still disagree on who perpetrated it—Moscow has denied any knowledge). Experts in cybersecurity went one step further: They called it the future of warfare.

Cyber Warfare: The New Frontier

The attack on Estonia’s “paperless government” (BBC) was one of the most publicized hacks in recent computing history. But it wasn’t the first case of cyber espionage, nor the most egregious. It’s the “tip of the iceberg of the quantity and quality of attacks that are going on,” says O. Sami Saydjari, president of the Cyber Defense Agency, a security consultant, and a former Pentagon computer security expert.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.