Two months after much of Estonia"s online infrastructure was targeted by an online attack, the U.S government is sending a representative from the Department of Homeland Security"s U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team to help analyze the large volume of data that was generated by the attacks. Additionally, a member of the U.S. Secret Service will be there to help with training on incident response and computer crime investigations.
In April, a widespread DDOS attack struck Estonia and affected government and banking Web sites. Early press reports linked the attacks to Russia, exacerbating tensions between the two countries, but investigators now say that it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. Unlike other Internet conflicts, the Estonian attacks do not seem to have been backed by a particular hacking group, said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist with Beyond Security. "They were of immense variety [and came] from the population of the Russian-speaking blogosphere," he said. Some attackers ran simple scripts on their PCs, while others trained sophisticated groups of botnet computers at the Estonian systems.