Wired writer Joshua Davis examines the recent DDoS attacks against Estonia, and found “Estonia’s  computer emergency response team responded to the junk packets with technical aplomb and coolheaded professionalism, while Estonia’s leadership … well, didn’t. Faced with DDoS and nationalistic, cross-border hacktivism — nuisances that have plagued the rest of the wired world for the better part of a decade — Estonia’s leaders lost perspective.” Davis finds that the attacks on Estonia were less sophisticated than those “between Israeli and Palestinian hackers, India and Pakistan, China and the U.S.” Davis is “skeptical that real cyberwar, or cyberterrorism, will ever take place. But what is certain is that the Estonia DDoS does nothing to illuminate our risk of it. No new attack techniques surfaced; the level of traffic was not surprising; the mitigation tactics were tried and true and, of course, successful. That Estonia’s public internet is small and easily overrun doesn’t change anything for the U.S.”
To see all of Joshua Davis’ Wired article, see blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/cyber-war-and-e.html