�Tsunami� of attacks interrupts station�s broadcastsFrom Gabriel Ronay In Budapest
Russia's state-licensed hacker forces have opened a new front in the east-west cyber war with an unprecedented mass cyber-attack on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American-financed radio station broadcasting from Prague to Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The attack began last weekend with a "tsunami" of bogus connection requests, which blocked some of the radio station's internet websites and caused many others to crash. In turn, this frontal cyber-attack also affected the radio's broadcast services to some 20 countries in the region. When RFE took electronic counter-measures the cyber-attacks intensified.
Significantly, Prague sources point out, RFE/RL's broadcasts to Belorussia, Russia, Iran, Bosnia and Kosovo were the target services quickly rendered inaccessible. A further tranche of disabled services include Azerbaijan and Tadjikistan, which have friendly links with the West but, in the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's policy-makers, belong to Russia's sphere of influence.
Cyber-assaults and hacker raids are virtual arms, but, in effect, they are real offensive weapons. Cyber-attacks can harm or even paralyse a country and are therefore the equivalents of physical military attacks. Nato's defensive treaty, drawn up in 1949, does not deal with this new-fangled weapon as there was no internet and very few computers at the time.
During the cold war there had been many Soviet attempts to jam the signals of RFE/RL, funded by Washington "to promote democratic values and institutions by disseminating factual information and ideas" in the communist empire. The present cyber attack on it is merely a continuation of this old cold war by more up-to-date means. How this virtual reality cyber-weapon was being used by the Russian hackers in last week's attack on the radio station is of considerable interest. At the height of the attack RFE/RL's websites received up to 50,000 fake requests for information, "hits" in cyber-language, every second. Cyberspace experts call this "denial-of-service attack" or DOS. According to Luke Springer, RFE/RL's head of technology, the attack initially targeted the radio station's Belorussian service, perhaps because of the radio's marking of the anniversary of the 1987 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Belorussia. However, the attack quickly spread to other news sites.
"Within hours eight websites - Russian, Belorussian, Iranian, Kosovar, Serbo-Croat, Tartar-Bashkir and Tadjik - were knocked out or made unavailable," he said. "The way this is usually done is by flooding the target website with fake requests to communicate, thereby using up the website's resources and rendering it useless to all legitimate users."
Simple really. Only in this case the hackers targeted, with the use of a massive network of interconnected computers, a great number of RFE/RL computers and then, in a co-ordinated move, simultaneously attacked all the websites. The broadcaster's operating computers crashed.
The Russian cyber-warriors' actions reveal the extraordinary vulnerability of institutions and even states to hacker penetration by a hostile power. Last week's massed hacker attack appears to define the stratagem of the cyber cold war. Its reach is surprising.
Well outside the rationale of the latest Russo-American cyber-swordfight, Russian hackers recently launched an attack on the website of Cheltenham town hall in the genteel Gloucestershire spa town.
This inexplicable attack seemed to indicate that Russia's secret hackers are intent on a worldwide demonstration of their cyber-prowess.
Last year, the Kremlin's cyber warriors debilitated Estonia's entire banking and state computer system following Moscow's angry protests over the former Soviet republic's decision to remove the Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn.
According to Reporters Sans Frontiéres, an independent organisation fighting for media freedom, the hackers who had attacked Estonia used the very same "distributed denial-of-service" type of hacker penetration as the one that debilitated RFE/RL last week.
The Russian hacker attack on Estonia rang alarm bellsin the capitals of former Soviet satellite states. Earlier this spring alien hackers briefly "occupied" the website of the High Court of Cassation in Bucharest.
Other Romanian public service websites, including that of the Romanian Railways, have also come under hacker attack.
Meanwhile, China's hackers are more than able to match Russia's capability to penetrate foreign computer networks, manipulate digital information and disrupt communications. Chinese cyber-spies have hacked into the computers of a number of leading British companies, including Rolls-Royce, and into the government computer networks of the US, France, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan.
Virtual reality raids appear to be the weapon of choice in the East-West cyber cold war.
