The bronze statue in Estonia's Tallinn Military Cemetery depicts a Soviet Red Army soldier with a war-weary face and a helmet in his hand.
It is a memorial to those who fought in the Second World War, but this year it became a symbol of how international conflicts are fought in the Information Age.
In April, Estonia removed the two-metre monument from its original perch at Liberators' Square in central Tallinn and placed it in the more inconspicuous cemetery, sparking Russian outrage.
The Russian government denounced the apparent slight and nationalist demonstrators gathered outside the Estonian embassy in Moscow but then something else happened: Estonian Internet sites started crashing.
The Web sites of the Estonian Prime Minister, Parliament, Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications all went down.
Estonian officials traced the source of the problems and discovered that their Web sites were being attacked -- by computers located inside the Russian government. It was cyber war.
And according to a newly declassified report by Canadian intelligence analysts, Ottawa had better be prepared for it.
Entire article:
http://www.canada.com/reginale... (Stewart Bell, National Post
January 2, 2008)
