Cyberterrorism: Case Studies of Denial-of-Service and Malicious Code Attacks

Running head: CYBERTERRORISM
Cyberterrorism or Information Warfare
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1CYBERTERRORISM
Russian Denial-of-Service attack
The cyberterrorism took place on 26th April, 2007 making Estonian government victim of
the attack. The attack was performed to protest against the removal of Bronze soldier monument
in Tallinn that was done by the Estonian government (Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013). The
government websites were targeted by the attack along with Estonian banks, universities and
newspaper. The full-scale cyber-attack was performed by an unknown attacker against the
government. The attack was not determined in the first twenty-four hours however was
discovered by Jaak Aaviksoo who was unable to log in to prime ministers website of Reform
Party.
The type of cyber-attack that was performed on Estonian government websites was
denial-of-service attack. The attack blocked access of authorized users to the network making the
entire network unavailable. The communication between the servers and users were blocked. The
attack was done in the form of distributed denial-of-service attack that destroyed information
infrastructure. Attackers targeted the government website first and then spread the attack further
to other political party that included Estonian parliament official site (Dunn Cavelty, 2013).
News publications were also targeted in the following weeks. The banking system of the country
was brutally damaged blocking online banking operations for Estonians. As a step to solve the
problem, international traffic was blocked by the Estonian government. It took the decision of
separating Estonia from rest of the world.
Cyberattacks during the 2008 South Ossetia war between Georgia and Russia