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.