Tallinn's old town. Photograph: Timur Nesametdinov/AP
Earlier this year, there was a lot of kerfuffle about a so-called cyberwar which struck Estonia's government - our European correspondent Ian Traynor reported the details, and it became big news on the web.
The tale has got the Wired treatment, prompting former hacker Kevin Poulsen to write a really interesting and detailed blog post on Wired.com explaining why thinks the story is overbaked.
Essentially his point is that Estonia (one of the world's most wired economies) took a bit of a beating, but the effects were overplayed thanks to overdramatic government response. The Estonia attack wasn't sophisticated, and cyberwar has already been with us for a while, he suggests.
In truth, U.S. network operators already deal with DDoS attacks of a similar, or greater, magnitude than the ones that hit Estonia. [Ralph] Peters argues that critical U.S. military networks and weapons systems could fall. Malware is getting pretty sophisticated, I'll admit, but I've yet to see a bot that can send packets from the public internet to a classified, air gapped Air Force network. If it exists, it can also do your laundry and walk your dog.
Bruce Schneier suggests reading the whole thing, and I'm inclined to agree.
