The New Front Line: Estonia under Cyberassault

Estonia, although small is a remarkably Web-dependent country, with widespread Internet access, digital identity cards, an 80-percent usage rate for online banking, electronic tax collection, and remote medical monitoring. The DDoS attacks began on the foreign minister´s Web site, but spread to all government institutions and key businesses, such as banks. On balance, the Estonian cyberwar ought to be a wake up call. Producing so much disruption for so little money has to be attractive to many groups. We know that people with evil intentions watched what happened; we can only hope that people with good intentions watched as well.