Whether it was cyber war or hactivism, the Estonian incident shows the devastation that a politically motivated network attack can have on government and commercial networks.

How close is World War 3.0?

...the targets and the inferred motivation were geo-political rather than economic or a simple grudge. That suggests we have turned a corner.
There are only two other known network attacks that were as devastating as the Estonian incident and have been called cyber warfare. One, dubbed [Titan Rain] by the U.S. government, took place in 2003 and involved Chinese military attacks on networks run by Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal and NASA. The other incident, which the U.S. government refers to as [Moonlight Maze], occurred in 1999 and involved Russian attacks on classified military information.

Lessons learned from Estonia

The packet floods used in the Estonian DoS attacks were not new. What was unusual about these attacks was the duration and the disruption they caused, experts say.

"The size and scale of these attacks in terms of the bandwidth and packets per second is in the middle in terms of what we have seen for these kinds of attacks," Nazario says. "But they lasted for weeks, not hours or days, which is much longer than we've seen for most of these attacks in the past."
...what's important for U.S. companies to learn about the Estonian incident is how much damage a small number of people with resources can do.

Sidebar: Five things Estonia did right in battling hacktivism

Here's what worked in Estonia to battle the [recent denial-of-service attacks]:

1. Admitting what's going on. The Estonian government didn't deny or try to hide the attacks. Because the attacks were globally sourced, ISPs that provide transit to Estonia could see that something was wrong. The Estonian government was wise not to try to deny the attack as a sign of weakness or cover it up as an embarrassment.

2. Asking for help. The Estonian Computer Emergency Response Team reached out to its peers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the service provider community to help it stop the flood of traffic before it hit their networks.

3. Rapid response. Experts converged upon Estonia to assist government officials and network service providers with attack analysis so they could start blocking traffic farther upstream.

4. ISP cooperation. Service providers worked together to help mitigate the attacks. Using such forums as the North American Network Operators' Group, ISPs have existing relationships that are useful when [denial-of-service] and other attacks occur.

5. State-of-the-art network-filtering techniques. [Vendors] including Arbor Networks and [Cisco] deployed high-speed gear to filter out selective types of traffic at line rates to minimize the DoS attacks. This gear helped keep targeted Web sites running.