The New York Times reports today ("War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia") that Estonia has suffered massive distributed denial-of-service attacks on its Internet infrastructure as a result of removing a statue of a Soviet solder from a park in Tallinn. Botnets were used to intensify the ferocity of the attacks. As many as one million zombie computers worldwide may have been involved.
The article notes:
The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.
Linton Wells II, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, said: "This may well turn out to be a watershed in terms of widespread awareness of the vulnerability of modern society."
Source: Landler, Mark, and John Markoff. "War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia." The New York Times, A1, C7.