Natalya Gorbanevskaya
The first issue of the 'Chronicle'
"There are almost no assessments there, just facts. And this composure, this outwardly serene perception of everything that happens, without hysterics, without emulating those who pressured this independent activity -- this was perhaps one of the most important features of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union," Cherkasov says. "Not to emulate the adversary, because otherwise you start resembling him." Memorial held an event marking the 40th anniversary of the "Chronicle" at its Moscow office on April 30, attended by Gorbanevskaya and other figures connected to the publication. Moscow Helsinki Group leader and noted human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseyeva told the crowd of some 200 people about the role "The Chronicle Of Current Events" played in her life. "I have done a lot in the human rights movement," she said. "But I think perhaps the most important thing I did was that I typed out the first issue of the 'Chronicle.' It was an epoch-making thing."
RFE/RL's Russian Service contributed to this report
"No to censorship" says sign at demonstration in Moscow
Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo called "cyberattacks" a threat to Estonia's national security
A little over a year ago, Estonia became the first country in the world to come under a broad and sustained attack from the Internet. Beginning on April 27, and continuing for several weeks, anonymous foreign networks comprising hundreds of thousands of computers repeatedly disabled Estonia's Internet servers used by the government, banks, media, and other organizations by bombarding them with information requests.
Life in the Internet-saturated country was severely disrupted.
The Estonian government accused the Kremlin of calling the attacks in retaliation for the removal of a Soviet World War II memorial from central Tallinn on April 26. NATO became alarmed, and Estonia now spearheads efforts within the alliance to cope with the threat of what has become known as "cyberattacks."
Hillar Aarelaid, the director of Estonia's Computer Emergency Response Team, was to say later that during the two peaks in the attacks -- on May 10 and May 15, 2007 -- Estonia first lost 50 percent of its "bread, milk, and gasoline" for 90 minutes and then again 75 percent of the same commodities for another five minutes.
During these two episodes, the attacks, simultaneously harnessing as many as 1 million remotely controlled computers across the world, infected with malicious software without their owners' knowledge, brought down the Internet servers of Estonia's biggest bank, Hansapank, among others. People paying for their gasoline, milk, and bread -- not to mention other purchases -- suddenly found that their bank cards didn't work.
It was a rude awakening for a country where connectivity is a way of life. Peeter Marvet, a leading independent information-technology (IT) analyst, tells RFE/RL that he frequently makes this point to foreign visitors by paying by card for minor purchases such as a cup of coffee. He reminds them that when they chat via Skype -- the Internet service for making calls and exchanging messages free of charge -- they are using software that was originally developed in Tallinn.
People parking their cars in Tallinn routinely pay by text message. Free wireless Internet is ubiquitous, as are people using laptops in cafes and restaurants.
This is not to mention something as basic as access to information, public or private, for which the Internet has become the sine qua non. Estonia has an "e-government" -- government meetings now involve no paperwork. Its public administration has become an "e-state" -- people vote, pay their taxes, and perform a multitude of other operations via the Internet. Outside office hours, teachers and pupils are linked into "e-schools."
So it is no wonder that when Estonia came under cyberattack it decided to take the matter to NATO, of which it has been a member since 2004. Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said at the time that the cyberattacks were a threat to Estonia's national security and likened their effect to a blockade of a country's sea ports.
From the start, Estonia sought to implicate the Russian government in orchestrating if not ordering the onslaught. However, the nature of such attacks makes it virtually impossible to track the real culprits as the computers used in them participate as "zombies," controlled by means of malicious software installed illicitly unbeknownst to their owners.
Given the difficulty of knowing who is behind cyberattacks, NATO has responded coolly to Estonian pressure to qualify cyberattacks as something that could trigger the alliance's collective defense clause. NATO made its position clearer this year, at its April 2-4 summit in Bucharest, where the alliance committed itself to provide assistance to members under cyberattack but said the member states themselves remain responsible for protection of their critical infrastructure.
One senior civilian NATO official dealing with the issue told RFE/RL in March that Estonia's response to the 2007 attacks was so effective as to preclude the need for drastic NATO action. He said NATO experts summoned by Estonia during the weeks of the attacks had learned "at least as much" as they had contributed in terms of advice.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has repeatedly called Estonia "NATO's most IT-savvy nation."
He has also indicated NATO would welcome an Estonian lead role in cyberdefense. This role is shortly likely to be formalized, as Estonia is about to win NATO accreditation for a path-breaking Cyber Defense Center based in Tallinn.
Even before the 2007 attacks, Estonia had started work on the center and had applied to NATO to have it recognized as a "NATO Center of Excellence." Although such "centers of excellence" are not part of the alliance's command structure, they can and do play an important role in shaping alliance policy and capabilities. Officials in Tallinn say NATO will formally give the Estonian Cyber Defense Center its imprimatur on May 15.
It seems likely that NATO has not said its last word on cyberattacks yet. Although the debate within the alliance has, for the time being, subsided, officials acknowledge the seriousness of the threat. A NATO general working with cyberdefense policy noted in a briefing in March that the alliance is committed by its statutes to protect the stability, prosperity, freedom, and shared values of its allies, as well as civilization. "A massive cyberattack could be a threat to them all," he said.
De Hoop Scheffer is also wont to describe cyberattacks as a "21st-century threat" for the entire alliance.
Internet user in Minsk (file photo)
The massive and coordinated attack, which began on the morning of April 26 as journalists were preparing coverage of protests in Minsk marking the 22nd anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, knocked the service offline for more than two full days.
"We are back!" read the headline on the service's homepage when it went back online on the evening of April 28.
"Dear friends. We value your solidarity and we promise to support any site that falls victim to such an attack in the future," read the accompanying post thanking 22 Belarusian websites for hosting content from the service's journalists while the site was disabled. "Thanks to all of you for your support of freedom."
Alyaksandr Lukashuk, director of RFE/RL's Belarus Service, says the response to the attack may have set a precedent for future online esprit de corps among pro-democracy advocates and journalists.
"What we see now is the first attempt in the Belarusian Internet community to act in solidarity to an attack on press freedom," Lukashuk says. "And it may be the most valuable -- and unexpected -- result of this attack."
It is still unclear who was behind the attack. But the fact that Belarusian opposition websites like those of Charter 97 and European Radio for Belarus were hit at the same time as RFE/RL has led many to suspect the regime of authoritarian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was the mastermind.
Timing Is Everything
The attack comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Minsk. Belarus has stepped up the arrest of pro-democracy activists and has ordered the United States to reduce the size of its embassy in Minsk to five people.
RFE/RL's Lukashuk says a smaller-scale cyberattack targeted his service's website on the same date in 2007.
In an online poll conducted on the Belarus Service's website, 87 percent of respondents blame the authorities for the attack.
"The character of the attack shows that the Belarusian authorities continue to block information on the Internet," Natalia Radina, the editor in chief of Charter 97's website, tells RFE/RL's Belarus Service. "Usually this happens during protest actions and election campaigns. What is particular to this case is that it was not just the case of [state telecom agency] Beltelekom blocking a site. It was a DOS attack. This is evidence that the Belarusian authorities use criminal actions against opposition sites."
DOS, or "denial-of-service" attacks, attempt to make a targeted website unavailable to users, normally by flooding the site with fake requests to communicate.
RFE/RL has been a frequent target of DOS attacks, but the latest incident was unprecedented in scale.
The attack against RFE/RL was so powerful that it penetrated the firewall that protects all the broadcasters' online activities and temporarily disabled a total of eight of its websites, affecting services to Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Iran, the Balkans, Russia, and Tatarstan, in addition to Belarus.
At the attack's height, RFE/RL websites were receiving up to 50,000 fake hits every second.
Official Hostility
Belarus is regularly cited as having one of the world's most repressive media environments. Freedom House, a U.S.-based rights monitor whose annual press freedom survey was issued on April 29, ranks Belarus alongside Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as three of its worst performers globally on media rights.
Christopher Walker, the director of studies at Freedom House, says the regime in Minsk has in recent years expanded its overall media crackdown to include the Internet -- one of the few places where journalists and ordinary citizens can still communicate without "government filters."
"Belarus falls into the category of a country whose possibilities for unrestricted discussion are greatest on the Internet at the moment, and it's one of the few positive areas there," Walker says. "Nevertheless, the authorities there work assiduously to restrict media freedom, and I think this has been a clear trend over quite a few years now."
Internet experts say it is extremely difficult to determine the origins of a DOS attack.
Yury Zisir chairs the popular Minsk-based web portal tut.by, which suffered a cyberattack earlier this year and has still not discovered the culprit despite reporting the incident to the police and conducting its own internal investigation.
"The reaction [from the police] when they tried to figure it out was that it is impossible to find the source," Zisir says. "Such an attack is very cheap to carry out. For $100 a day, you can order a hit [against a website] with no problem. It is cheap and it is not possible to find the source."
He says that tut.by's own investigation led it to a provider on the island of Borneo. "Supposedly there was a program there [on Borneo] that was behind everything," Zisir says. "It was clear that there was [already] nothing there. Somebody was just taunting us."
Alyaksandr Lukashuk