Chillin’ out by the pool on my holidays, readin the new edition of wired magazine. It seems Estonia has had a bad time of it recently.

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What is believed to have been a Russian attack, the entire Estonian IT infrastructure grinded to a halt. What fueled this attack? Estonia relocated the “Bronze Soldier,” a Soviet-era war memorial commemorating an unknown Russian who died fighting the Nazis. The bot network was not hired out for money, but hired out for free in retaliation to this event. The first of the attacks was a DDoS attack on the country’s new papers. The attack then escalated to the banks websites etc.

Through contacting the (what the article calls) ‘vetted’, the retaliation of the attack began. These vetted came into contact with one IT director at the magazine. Understood the issue and began to help. First by banning as many malicious IPs as possible. The majority of the bots were from US.

After a period of exactly 2 weeks. The bot network began to reside to a full halt.