The computer attack aimed recently at Estonia possibly by Russian sources, is a sign that cyber warfare is now becoming a real problem internationally. A political issue (the relocation of a Soviet WWII memorial) has resulted in a physical cyber war. This is a disturbing trend, as we have seen the progression from a hypothetical situation to a new reality.

Cyber warfare is not usually defined as being a clear military attack but a country’s infrastructure and online resources can be attacked and economic damage caused, in essence a low level form of economic warfare is being conducted.

Australia needs to increase funding and expand initiatives aimed at protecting critical infrastructure if it is to avoid an Estonian style cyber war. We can expect to see an increase in cyber warfare attacks when political disagreements between countries occur as a form of harassment that falls short of actual conflict.

The Estonian attack took the form of vast numbers of “botnets” used to undertake a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. "Botnets" or groups of computers infected with malicious software are remotely used to launch such attacks. A DDOS attack involves sending forged requests to a computer system that will reply to the requests, with the intention of slowing or causing a system to crash through the sheer number of requests and volume of data. The DDOS attack was also augumented by a series of hacker attacks aimed at trying to deface key Estonian web-sites. The overall aim of the attacks was to slow these down so that they did not function, or crashed.

Among the websites affected by the DDOS attacks were those of the Estonian Parliament and Presidency, key Estonian government departments, all political parties and leading Estonian banking and media organisations. The Estonian government estimated that over a million computers were involved in the cyber warfare attacks and the cost of damage inflicted will run into tens of millions of Euros

A feature of cyber warfare is that it can be launched by a country, sub-state group or even an individual. A worry for Australia now is that whenever we have a political disagreement with another country or group, the end result could be a cyber attack against our extensive online infrastructure.

Australia needs to prepare for this future risk by expanding our current critical infrastructure protection and increasing funding for cyber defence. We would not want a repetition of the Estonian situation within our own cyber borders.