Russian Political 'Hackers' Growing Capabilities

The Register has an article with some details of the Estonia attack last year showing that the attack, while not as organized or sophisticated as it could have been was, nonetheless, effective. The article also discusses the growing threat and capabilities of politically motivated computer criminals in Russia:

"By Western standards, the attacks weren't all that sophisticated. They topped out at about 100MB per second, compared with as much as 40GB per second unleashed against some targets. They also employed protocols such as ICMP and TCP SYN, which have been used for so long that they are no longer effective against many hardened targets.

But more recent events may show that politically motivated attackers are growing more savvy. Over the past several months, Nazario has documented attacks on sites belonging to groups on both sides of the Russian establishment. Targets include the Party of Regions, a pro-Russian party led by Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych; the site of Gary Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster turned critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin; and namarsh.ru, another dissident site. All attacks have been carried out using botnets, Nazario says."

The article also discusses 'BlackEnergy' a new, more stealthy tool, to carry out distributed denial of service attacks.

'Ragtag' Russian army shows the new face of DDoS attacks