I did briefly flirt with the idea of creating a category here called "Undo". For the news media is hardly covering itself with glory at the moment: the "married twins" who don't seem to have existed (or possibly do.. hell) and the norovirus epidemic that wasn't.
And now: the cyberwar attack on Estonia by enraged Russians. Last May we reported that
A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.
...Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to [Estonia's capital[] Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."
Well, in that case one has to say that downsizing has hit warfare. For the latest on that attack is that it was done by one kid. In his bedroom. In Estonia. And he's Estonian er, perhaps Russian. (I await a definitive parsing of his name.)
According to InfoWorld, a 20-year-old Estonian student has been fined for the attacks:
Dmitri Galushkevich used his home PC to launched a denial-of-service attack that knocked down the Web site for the political party of Estonia's prime minister for several days, said Gerrit Maesalu, spokesman for the Northeast District Prosecutor's Office in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. Galushkevich must pay 17,500 kroons (about £800).
They could put it onto his student loan, maybe. That'll teach him.
Galushkevich is the only person who has been convicted since the cyberattack in April and May 2007 crippled the Web sites of banks, schools, and government agencies.
..."He [Galushkevich] wanted to show that he was against the removal of this bronze statue," Maesalu. "At the moment, we don't have any other suspects."
However - to try to alleviate the egg now being wiped off faces - the prosecutor did leave the door open slightly for everyone not to have been completely OTT on this:
police are still trying to find others who may have been involved in the attacks, although the investigation is complicated since the attackers are likely outside Estonia, Maesalu said.
In retrospect, it makes some of the comments to the news blog post of the day about this (and the post itself, to be fair) look sensible.
Rule 1 of any suitably dramatic but not-very-well-sourced story: apply Occam's Razor. In the case of cyberwarfare, seek someone probably too young to use a razor of any sort.
