Beware the Russians
What the hell is Vladimir Putin playing at?
A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.
While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians’ removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
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Filed in: Current affairs,The World
Putin is a bully boy
I was just reading that on Guardian on my lunch break! bizarre isn’t it. whilst i was doing my masters – part of it was on global terror outfits and how they organize ( ha!) and cyberwar was a key component i found out. RAND have published lots of interesting material on this.
i wonder if we’ll be able to find out whether the coders were working for the russian govt or doing their own thing?
what do the techies out there think?
Don’t say anything against the Russians on this website Sunny
Putin was a major in the KGB in his younger days. Old habits die hard eh
great way to conduct war tho, don’cha think?
Estonia didn’t give russia deuxe points at the eurovision. What the fuck did they expect? A hug and a vodka punch? They were dicing with death the moment they announced the vote. You could tell from the slight shrill in Terry’s voice that he, along with the nation, nay the world, predicted this backlash. The fools
Now Russia stopped the oil export to Estonia,So the war or dispute continues…
European Breakdown Cover
Spambots getting smarter.
why is everybody so surprised? the russian have never given a feck what anyone in the rest of the world thought of them. they understand power politics and don’t even make a pretence of slapping a nod towards the distant country of ethics on top of it. not very pleasant but at least you know where you stand.
the mistake people make is because they’re white, people think they’re european – even europeans make this mistake and then get all huffy and hurt when they don’t act like them.
this is the country that invented the knout.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Actually … being the devils advocate that I normally am … there is no real reason to think that this has been endorsed by Putin.
These things are normally launched from bot nets that are run by criminal gangs.
Now if you know any Russians they are highly nationalistic, are quite aggressive and proud. I’ve been to Estonia and this issue really splits the tiny country and as always both sides have a point, although my sympathies lie with the Estonians rather than the Russians.
Basically all that I’ll driving at is the removal of the statue is highly symbolic and upsets ALL Russians including the criminal gangs that organize cyber attacks on gambling websites.
It works like this, you get an email with a bank account number and you don’t pay x amount by a certain time they take your site down during a major sporting event like the grand national, losing you a fortune in trade. The only really defense for these companies is to have enough servers and enough bandwidth to sustain their service throughout the attack.
So it is quite likely that the owners of these bot nets have decided to attack Estonia purely for their own reasons.
Either way “Beware the Russians” damn right!
TFI
the mistake people make is because they’re white, people think they’re european – even europeans make this mistake and then get all huffy and hurt when they don’t act like them.
Quite franky we often make the same mistake with the Americans.
TFI
As an aside I wish they’d stop calling it ‘cyber’ war, it’s such an embarrassingly outdated 90s term…
the mistake people make is because they’re white, people think they’re european – even europeans make this mistake and then get all huffy and hurt when they don’t act like them.
I agree. Russians behave more like South Asians, or them lot from ‘back home’, with their pronounced sense of “scarcity mentality”.
What does scarcity mentality mean?
Aeroflot? Aerofart more like
Moscow Bell? Moscow balls more like
Siberia? Sibollocks more like
Been to Russia. Bunch of miserable wooly coated shysters
Sid #5
Yeah better than bullets and bombs, maybe this could be the way of the future. Anti democratic to disable web sites etc but even then!!! The other alternative should be an organised bun fight.
This is scary. Estonia is a nice little country, but it’s got this guerilla of a neighbour. Remember when they screwed about with the gas supplies? …these guys are becoming a pain in the ass.
I fully support the bun fight, which seems to be an eastern European tradition – there is a tea room in Prague, where, if you pay your 20 euro, you can throw yesterday’s stale donuts at all the customers!
Russia is a Khanate. They may be largely Christian, but their political culture is entirely Central Asian. Russians worship order, not democracy. The stronger the political leader, the happier they are.
When Putin showed up in public a few years back wearing a traditional Russian Kaftan, you just knew something was amiss.
leon – 90s term it may sound like but it is actually used in defence terminology!
Riz,
Russia is usually alluded to as a bear. In all the Baltic states there are large populations of ethnic Russians and they are a huge threat to the stability of countries such as Estonia.
Yes Russia is full of hard men and autocracy does seem to be a style of government that many Russians desire. Unfortunately they have huge natural resources that the rest of the world desire. Money is pouring in and you can bet that much of it is not being used for benign purposes. Putin has made it clear that Russia is still a world power so we should all be careful.
Chelsea included.
Extremely well said and couldn’t have put it better, completely agree.
Yeah I know, it still makes me cringe though…
David Miscavige vs Valdimir Putin
Who’d win?
>>> A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state…
Wrong. China had a pop at Taiwan, oooh, must have been 4-5 years ago now, maybe slightly longer…
The caricature image of Roman Abramovich in the new Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse comedy comes to mind. He character goes around trying to buy everything in sight, including a little girl’s tears!
Off topic, but what’s with Harry’s Place? Has it folded?
Looks like they haven’t been paying their bills. I’m sure the world will survive without their particular brand of enlightment for a time…
“Looks like they haven’t been paying their bills”
Ha ha.
Harry’s Place has risen from the dead, you doubting Thomases.