Estonia is all sorted out now. Looks like another case of sensationalist journalism rather than international conspiracy. Who'd have thought...?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/24/estonian_ddos_fine/

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/01/25/0120221

A

Interesting, a 20-year old loser and some of his friends managed to overload Estonian governmental, banking and police computer systems for almost ten days.

Um, is this supposed to make us feel better?

-Blast

The fact that they arrested one 20-year old ethnic Russian is hardly conclusive proof that he was solely, or even largely, responsible. That's like arresting some low-level drug mule in Miami and concluding that he and his frat buddies were responsible for all the cocaine in America, and that all this talk about Colombian cartels is just so much media hype.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. The attacks in Estonia were highly organized, targeted, and sustained. Maybe it was just a group of disguntled ethnic Russian or maybe it was something more serious/sinister; we'll probably never know for sure.

What we can say is that, as long as critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber-attack, both terrorist organizations and national governments will be investigating ways to exploit this weakness. We'd be fools to assume otherwise.

I have been in the computer security auditing and remediation business for banks, municipalities, etc. since the late 80's.

Blast is correct. Hacking the power grid or just about any other public utility is a potential threat. If it is connected to the Internet, it is potentially at risk. Also, it doesn't take much for an insider to compromise even the most sophisticated security system.

However, as an individual, I would be more concerned about ever growing number of ways that you can have your identity stolen.

For example, we had a local fast food worker stealing debit card numbers using a hand-held card reader(skimmer). This is a fast growing problem, because it is so easy to do.

http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/heraldnews/news/716130,4_1_JO28_CARDSWIPE_S1.article

GarlyDog, CISSP

Um, that's not an update. It is a repeat of the same devoid-of-any-content story.

A

Here's an update with some more information.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/from-the-moment.html#posts

I would guess that power disruption to any of our homes is more likely from a local problem be it a squirrel, snow storm, hurricane, earthquake, lightning or the neighbor kid with his car hitting a pole down the street. Then it is from a terrorist, or hacker attack.

But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the possibly of a terrorist attack on the power grid. I don’t know that I have any say in any of the ways the power can be interrupted.

Hopefully understanding power can be loss, and that it will be done beyond our control and that it’s somewhat Vidal to our lives, we should work on a way to provide it when it’s disrupted. Be it a terrorist or the neighbor kid in his hot rod car it’s probably not going to be down more then 3-days.

A generator and fuel for a week and a plan to conserve electricity would probably get any one of us through an outage, even a terror or hacker attack.

You may become somewhat popular with your neighbors when they see the lights on at your home.

Stealth may be a consideration.