Gadi Evron: Estonia: Information Warfare and Strategic Lessons

Black Hat Briefings, USA 2007 [Audio] Presentations from the security conference.

In this talk we will discuss what is now referred to as "The 'first' Internet War" where Estonia was under massive online attacks for a period of three weeks, following tensions with the local Russian population.
Following a riot in the streets of Tallinn, an online assault begun, resulting in a large-scale coordination of the Estonian defenses on both the local and International levels. We will demonstrate what in hind-sight worked for both the attackers and the defenders, as well as what failed. Following the chronological events and technical information, we will explore what impact these attacks had on Estonia's civil infrastructure and daily life, and how they impacted its economy during the attacks.
Once we cover that ground, we will evaluate what we have so far discussed and elaborate on lessons learned while Gadi was in Estonia and from the post-mortem he wrote for the Estonian CERT. We will conclude our session by recognizing case studies on the strategic level, which can be deducted from the incident and studied in preparation for future engagements in cyber-space.
Gadi Evron works for the Mclean, VA based vulnerability assessment solution vendor Beyond Security as Security Evangelist and is the chief editor of the security portal SecuriTeam. He is a known leader in the world of Internet security operations, and especially in the realm of botnets and phishing as well as is the operations manager for the Zeroday Emergency Response Team (ZERT). He is a known expert on corporate security and espionage threats. Previously Gadi was the Israeli Government Internet Security Operations Manager (CISO) and the Israeli Government CERT Manager which he founded.