Estonian Fined For Cyber Attack
By Christopher Nickson
January 28, 2008
An ethnic Russian youth in Estonia becomes the first person fined for last year's cyber attack on the government.
Last April and May a series of service attacks against Estonian government sites almost brought the small Baltic nation to a standstill. There was a belief that Russia was behind it all, in the wake of Estonia removing a Soviet war memorial from its capital, and Nato was called in to investigate.
The real reason proved to be less sinister. The hackers were based in Estonia itself, and one of them, Dmitri Galushkevich, was fined $1650 for his part in the cyber attacks, according to the BBC.
Galushkevich is one of about 375,000 ethnic Russians in the country of 1.3 million, and prosecutors asserted that the student took part in the cyber attacks as a protest against Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.
The denial of service attacks hit the site of Andrus’s political party, government agencies, other political parties and even newspapers, and were part of a bigger picture including rioting where one person was killed.
Galushkevich admitted his part in the organized hacking.
"In deciding the verdict, the court took into account the fact that he had no criminal record," Gerrit Maesalu, spokesman for the regional prosecutor's office in north-east Estonia, told AFP.
At the time of the attacks, Estonia blamed Russia and described the attacks as a “cyber war.”