Yes, Uncle Scam. Nice post Bernard.
Rummy has taken a grudging step towards Dem povs – collaboration is needed – but he limits it to ‘ideas’ – right in the Bush line, as if propaganda today could have any effect except on opportunisitic scammers who are keen, and effective, in exploiting other’s weakness and spinning tall tales. And, he says the US military needs help…from other US organisms, thus keeping to the go-it-alone mantra.

Posted by: Tangerine | Jan 25 2008 17:37 utc | 3

Aha!!
I found the spanner in the works!
You’ve incorrectly dated the last news account at Jan. 24, 2007, when the link follows to an article of 2008.
It all makes sense now! 🙂

Posted by: Marek Bage | Jan 26 2008 0:03 utc | 5

we don’t have any other suspects.

Zero suspects is what you would expect from an anonymous DDoS attack. That or a frustrated teenage scriptkiddy who got a hold of of a trojan and a some botnet code, but is to young to think about such things as covering his tracks.
But the existence of a suspect doesn`t say anything about how big or little the attack was. There are zero suspects of the DDoS attacks on the DNS root servers, that doesn`t make the attack less memorable. And there must have been tons of groups of kids that got caught and that I cant remember at the moment.
Its my understanding that a significant chunk of the Estonia DDoS traffic was ICMP traffic. This is said to have come from the many readers of Russian language blogs following instructions to run ICMP echo “ping” tests against Estonian servers. I remember when I was like a 14 year old and the teardrop attack was the hot new thing. Compared even to that a bunch of people running ping is just incredibly sad.
Not at all impressive or sophisticated, but with enough people it can still saturate a serious internet link. This would mean there are a couple of Russian bloggers out there that if you can find them then maybe they did some inciting DoS kind of crime… Maybe if you work hard on making a list then Russia will help fine them. I can understand why the Estonian prosecutor didn`t bother. If he did then the list of suspects would be longish, but the attack wouldn`t be impressive at all.
There may have been a real botnet based DDoS part at one point during the attacks. What I remember of kids getting caught over the malware based DDoS is that they where caught because their extortion demands to online banks and casino`s and the accompanying bank accounts got traced back to them. Tracing the attacks can be harder since they come from the thousands of windows computers of people to lazy to run patches or have their ten year old nephew clean out the malware at 50$ an hour.
From what I heard there was no extortion. It was just the kind of nationalism that has been seen many times before. There have been vandals that DoS and deface things before they are old enough to write their own code let alone have a nuanced view on international relations for decades. I can think of American Chinese and Turkish kids as being annoying recently over such as the Belgrade embassy bombing, the spyplane incident, minor Armenian genocide comments in the least exciting corners of the world… and Al Jazeera just existing. Smart money says these kids, if there were any, wont get caught or suspected of anything.
So yes this was a very boring 90`s like attack that didn`t impress anyone. But that doesn`t logically follow from the fact that one unimpressive (and Estonian) kid got caught. My gut feeling is that if there were decent measurements of the size of the attack that it would be microscopic compared to what banks and casino`s deal with on a monthly basis. At least there the attackers have the brains to go after routers or DNS servers or something central like it. There is no doubt that a “run this ping command” attack is childish and silly. But if enough people join in then its still almost as much of a headache as a serious attack by people who know what they do. Even by todays low standards of kids and their scripts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie
So 90 year old NATO generals after years of vandalisms on the “internets” finally notice and sound like idiots with their “cyber-terror” “cyberwar”-cries. But that doesn`t mean that the NSA and unit 8200 didn`t reverse Cisco Routers and GSM phones as part of serious signals inteligence and electronic warfare work that has been going on since the second world war.

Posted by: ek | Jan 28 2008 0:23 utc | 7