A Progress Report on Combating Cyber Attacks

Hackers have been online since a Cornell graduate student infected MIT’s burgeoning network with the first Internet worm on November 2, 1988. But recently cyber attacks on states have proliferated both in numbers and severity. The best-known recent example of such a cyber attack was on April 27, 2007. In a matter of hours, the websites of Estonia’s leading banks and newspapers crashed. Government communications were compromised. An enemy had invaded and was assaulting dozens of targets across the country. But this was not the result of a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon of mass destruction. Nor was it a classical terrorist attack. A computer network was responsible, with attacks coming from thousands of zombie private computers around the world. And this was just the beginning. Flash forward to August 7, 2008 when immediately prior to the Russian army invading Georgia en masse a cyber attack reportedly crippled the IT systems of the Georgian military including air defense. Georgian command and control was forced to resort to U.S. government and Google accounts while Estonian advisors helped to deflect the ongoing cyber onslaught.

For my full article on how cyber security has progressed since the 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia, please visit: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1499849