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:

[UncleTogie (1004853)]

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.)

[noz (253073)]

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:

[by Anonymous Coward]

No, because I can read.

Re:Estonia

[Mental Maelstrom (1268890)]

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

[Mental Maelstrom (1268890)]

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:

[Darinbob (1142669)]

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 think Russia is getting over some self identity issues, and Estonia has aggravated this. Russia used to be a big empire, both under the Czars and the Communists, and this is part of the national psyche. So after the fall of the Soviet empire, there was s

bummer

[the brown guy (1235418)]

Cyber Defence sounds so much more cooler than it actually is...

Re:bummer

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

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:

[RuBLed (995686)]

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

What happen ?

[jddj (1085169)]

Somebody set up us the hub!

Re:

[tankadin (1175113)]

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

NATO ? Russia ?

[bytesex (112972)]

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 and does them deliberately.

Weird.

Re:NATO ? Russia ?

[thealsir (927362)]

Estonians have always rejected Russian interference in their affairs.

Re:

[bytesex (112972)]

I know that. But this isn't just a case of Estonians doing something - I applaud them for wanting to defend every one of their borders. It's a case of NATO being an undiplomatic elephant here. I just wonder who is making these policy decisions, what goes on in their head and what their aims are. Last I checked, NATO was a military defence organisation, not an IT outsourcing company.

Re:

[dunkelfalke (91624)]

be careful with the word "always".
estonia was a part of the russian empire for two centuries.

Re:

[Mental Maelstrom (1268890)]

...an action easily understood when the only alternative is persecution, deportation or death.

Re:NATO ? Russia ?

[by Anonymous Coward]

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 ?

[mauri (168049)]

"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.

Re:

[Darinbob (1142669)]

But was it cyberwar by Russia? Hardly.

I think there was a period of time when people strongly suspected Russian government involvement or that the Kremlin was looking the other way. I can imagine some NATO people starting plans for "cyber defense" during this time.

Re:

[Darinbob (1142669)]

I wouldn't say it was PR work of US or NATO. The Kremlin was very obviously and openly critical of Estonia for moving their statue, stood by idly while the Estonia was blockaded by Putin-youth, and then there was a DDoS attack from inside Russia aimed at some Estonian government ministries. It's not hard to jump to conclusions there.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Let alone mention that such an institution could in the future help the pesky Ests defened themeselves against cyber attacks. Such as the ones directed against them by Russia when they dared remove a soviet statue from the center of Tallinn. NATO is clearly trying to provoke the peace loving Russians!

"set up" is ambiguous, no

[Mathinker (909784)]

I first read the title expecting to see some kind of uber-social-engineering against an existing defense hub. I'd wonder if the ambiguous use of "set up" was actually intentional, but yes, I'm familiar with Hanlon's Razor.

Estonia, estonia...

[redtuxrising (1258534)]

Ah, here it is! Let's see... Area: 17,413 sq mi, Population: 1,340,602. Huh, well you don't *need* a gov't/military power to DDoS that country. The state of Oregon has more servers and IT personnel than the country of Estonia. 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.

Re:Estonia, estonia...

[shiznatix (924851)]

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:

[PenGun (794213)]

Indeed once one has some presence in their little crib, which I imagine will be almost instant, then the training will commence. I dunno if they will benefit from it though. ;)

  Damn a million services, 1.3 million people on line, wow man you guys are fantastic. A billion combinations and plus big time traffic, you know this may just be the real problem.

  Teh intranets are just such massive fun.

Re:

[antirelic (1030688)]

Estonia, like many other Baltic nations and former Soviet satellite nations, are in the middle of a constant power struggle between East and West. Your argument comparing Oregon and Estonia is pretty much irrational, due to the fact that Oregon does not have the Russian foreign service trying to alter its foreign agenda. Russia, which has pretty much dominated Estonia and most other Baltic nations since the early 19th century, has become a resurgent power with expanding capabilities and has been using those

Obvious Foreshadowing

[by Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Yogiz (1123127)]

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:

[Alex Belits (437)]

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 are maintaining ongoing up to date information on security-related matters. OpenBSD was founded in 1995. SELinux was released in 2000. grsecurity in 2001. Those are only most prominent software projects related to security.

The only thing you are "pioneeri

Re:

[Alex Belits (437)]

While Estonia may not pioneering on this issue. Estonia was the first country in the world to use Internet voting (known as "e-voting" in Estonia) back in March, 2007. Accordingly, about 30 000 people used the Internet to vote for their candidates.

Why exactly is this supposed to be a good thing?

But your parent poster made a good point. Estonia is small enough to try these computer systems, and since its IT infrastructure is rather new, it can allow for quite newer methods and do it a lot faster.

Newer methods are not called "IT solutions". You have "IT solution" when an outside consultant brings you massive amount of various companies' marketing materials, and half a year into the project you are running most expensive software packages ever made by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Siebel, and $deity knows what, yet your paid-by-the-hour consultants seem to be incapable of making those things provide anything that is actually useful for your company. You

What?!

[phagstrom (451510)]

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

Re:

[Digestromath (1190577)]

If they build a hub, do they not then need at least a hubcap for protection?

Re:

[phagstrom (451510)]

Jeez, it gets worse and worse. First they use a hub, now they are capping the connection.

At first, they should grow up

[RCL (891376)]

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:

[Mental Maelstrom (1268890)]

No, Estonia can't ignore Russia, and it wont. But Russia MUST STOP trying to rule Estonia and respect Estonia as a sovereign nation. Until Russia stops the offensive towards Estonia, Estonia will have a defencive stance towards the nation which has brought them so much great suffering in the past.

Shouldn't Estonia defend itself? Should we instead bow to the hostile soviets looking to swallow us?

Re:At first, they should grow up

[CRCulver (715279)]

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.

Re:

[RCL (891376)]

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.

You know, even if Russia's population halved today, it would still be larger than Iran, let alone Iraq. You can't ignore opinion of such a large group of people being in your direct neighbourhood, nor you can't prevent them from flooding the neighbouring EU countries (e.g. if civil war breaks out in Russia), and becoming an important minority in those.

Isolationist policy won't help here. It would help for overseas territories like US, but it won't for EU. EU is setting a time bomb by trying to isolate it

Re:

[fsmunoz (267297)]

The birthrate of ethnic Russians is going down quickly, the birthrate of minorities

Estonia must answer to its fellow EU members when it formulates foreign policy decisions.

Slightly offtopic... but what you say about Russia is even more true in Western Europe. If you consider that Russia is close to being "torn apart", I wonder what is your opinion on the rest of the EU (I think you're right BTW, since I think that Europe is also close to being torn apart).

How exacly they can help?

[foobar123 (1174837)]

AFAIK DDoS is more quality of service and ISP issue... Is it going to be training center where ISPs can send their employees to take IPv4, "packet filtering" and "upstream traffic tracking" courses? Or they will hack ISPs routers, track streams themselves and will nuke "areas of origin in a question" from the orbit?

Re:

[Alex Belits (437)]

...or, alternatively, they will just raise oil prices and sell some tanks and fighter jets to someone you don't like. International pissing matches 2.0 -- now over the Internet!

So the pertinent questions is...

[religious freak (1005821)]

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?

Re:

[iNaya (1049686)]

Why is the USA never mentioned?? Because the NSA is behind all cyber-crimes in the world. Hacking, spamming, DDoS, Nigerian scams... It's all one big cover up!!1!11

Re:

[Glenn Rubenstein (1288436)]

One school of thought would suggest that by not making a big deal out of it, the USA isn't putting out information to help others beat the system, etc. Just a thought.

A Hub ... Priceless

[PenGun (794213)]

Amazing but I must encourage this fortifying of the internet against the terrorist and evil forig ....... collapses helpless with laughter. A hub, a fucking hub. These people are way beyond clueless.

Propaganda: Disgruntled Youth or Evil Russians?

[intnsred (199771)]

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:Blame Russia?

[shiznatix (924851)]

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:

[megaditto (982598)]

I don't really care one way or another, but this Estonia situation reminds me of 9-11 somewhat:

What we observed: A bunch of Saudi Arabian fanatics hijacked 4 planes in 2001 and killed thousands of Americans.
Our conclusion: A bunch of Shiite kooks in Afganistan were to blame
Our response: Captured and killed a bunch of Sunni kooks in Iraq

I'd be laughing right now, but Russia still has some nukes (and my family happens to live exactly where most of those weapons are targeted).

Re:

[Darinbob (1142669)]

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.

Also the police were just standing around and magically unable to intervene. That was far more telling to me than any DDoS attack; that a youth group could blockade an embassy and attack cars entering it while the government just stood by watching. Maybe that sort of thing happens in third world countries now and then, but this was in Russia...

Re:

[VON-MAN (621853)]

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 service FSB, and is typical of the bully Putin.

Re:

[iNaya (1049686)]

Doesn't matter whether who did it; cyber-defence is still relevant, especially if they don't want their servers going down again.