How hackers attacked an entire country

Through a sophisticated multi-pronged attack, hackers were able to paralyze an entire country, marking the first known case of cyber warfare.

Imagine this: there’s a guy surfing the web, specifically the Russian internet.

Let’s call him Vadim.

Vadim’s hands are shaking, partly with fear but mostly with excitement.

He highlights a line of code, copies it, holds “command,” pastes the code, and then presses enter.

While Vadim isn’t a hacker and barely knows how to work a computer bar when he plays games, he assures himself that “the ends justify the means.”

Despite being pretty much tech-illiterate, Vadim has just launched his very first cyberattack.

After finding this line of code on a popular gaming forum, Vadim decided to execute it, and hundreds of miles away in another country, a server got pinged. Not once, not twice, but thousands of times.

This creates a domino effect, and people across Russia run the original line of code, leading to millions of requests that flood the server every second.

The multitude of requests overloads the server, causing it to crash. One website goes down, then another, then another.

It’s fine. Only informational sites belonging to the government go offline.

But then, social services systems, news websites, banking systems, and major services become inaccessible. This is very serious.

Vadim and a bunch of other people just attacked Estonia, a Northern European country. It’s a Baltic state that sits a bit too close to the “Russian Bear” and is about the same size as Ohio.

Estonia was plunged into total darkness and chaos following a cyberattack in 2007.

The scale was beyond comprehension for that time, but the battleground that was Estonia may shed some light on why this small country was hit by such a massive cyberattack.

For decades, empires fought over Estonia, and after the Soviet Union crumbled, the small Baltic state gained its independence.

The country launched a modernization campaign and digitized everything – banking, taxes, commerce, etc.

While many took inspiration from Estonia’s resilience, the country’s independence didn’t bode well with some people.

One person in particular, a budding Russian politician and Vladimir Putin’s number one fan, Konstantin Goloskokov, set his sights on Estonia.

So, Goloskokov, with help from the “Nashi” youth movement in Russia, decided to start posting malicious code across various forums.

“Do you want to help your motherland to fight fascism once again? Then, perform these simple commands. No need to be a hacker or a programmer, just copy a code that will ping a random Estonian site thousands of times,” was the sentiment shared on forums across the Russian internet.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is relatively easy to deal with, if you have the right tools. But, a second wave of botnets, a hoard of zombie devices infected with malware, would communicate with Estonian servers sending well written and timed requests – not arbitrary pings.

This kind of attack is extremely difficult to mitigate and could make servers inaccessible for weeks on end.

Then you have another facet of the attack, which was actual Russian hackers trying to hack into Estonian websites.

The hackers tried everything, from injecting random code to sending phishing emails, and sometimes, they succeeded. Eventually, sites were taken offline and rendered unusable.

The attack was multi-pronged, which set the example of what we would later know as hybrid warfare.

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