Should We Go To War Over A Massive Cyber-Attack?
Estonia is doing it again. The tiny Eastern European nation – holder of the first Internet election – is pushing the boundaries to set another legal precedent. But this time around, a change in the law could entail serious international consequences.
It all started a few weeks ago. Weary of Russian attempts to reportedly meddle in its internal affairs, the former Soviet satellite state decided to relocate a Soviet war memorial from the center of its capital Tallinn to a cemetery. The action angered Russians living in Estonia and beyond. Among the actions taken against Estonia was a massive cyber-attack, lasting weeks, which Estonian public officials and business executives claim originated at the top levels of the Russian government.
Estonia may be small in territorial size, but when it comes to its former handlers, it’s ready to display a big attitude. The country’s top public officials went straight to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to report the attacks, which disabled the sites of ministries and political parties, as well as of some of the largest newspapers, banks and businesses in the country.
“Attacking one member state means an attack against the entire European Union,” Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip alleged. “We have turned to the European Union and we ask them to take immediate action.”
Prime Minister Ansip and other Estonian public officials alluded to Article V of the NATO Treaty, which states that an attack on one of its members shall be considered an attack against all and enables these nations to exercise the right of self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. Most EU member states – including Estonia – also belong to NATO.
Estonian Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo, meanwhile, discussed the situation with NATO officials and later stated the following during an interview with British newspaper The Guardian: “At present, NATO does not define cyber-attacks as a clear military action. This means that the provisions of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, or, in other words collective self-defense, will not automatically be extended to the attacked country. Not a single NATO defense minister would define a cyber-attack as a clear military action at present. However, this matter needs to be resolved in the near future.”
NATO cyber-terrorism experts have traveled to the country to assist Estonians in determining the source of the attack and boosting the country’s electronic defenses. The attack has been described as a distributed denial of service attack. A denial of service attack is defined as an attack against a computer or network that attempts to limit access to the Internet by flooding it with requests for a webpage or emails. A more sophisticated variant of this attack is said to be the distributed denial of service attack, where hackers rely on viruses to take over multiple computers to engage in the attack, thus increasing the amount of malicious traffic and decreasing the ability of the owners of the victim machine or network to defend themselves. In the Estonian case, the IT experts prevented foreign Internet addresses from accessing the sites under attack until the situation was under control.
The President of the European Council, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Commission President José Manuel Barroso, meanwhile, were scheduled to discuss the cyber-attack issue during a recent EU summit with Russia, which judging by their grave faces during the final press conference, did not seem to yield positive results. In the past, Russia and China have been linked to electronic espionage. Now, it may be wise to admit that governments must evaluate measures to effectively handle countries that decide to engage in this novel type of warfare.