Invisible War - Cyber-warfare plot of Die Hard 4.0 doesn't seem so far-fetched

We'd never thought of Bruce Willis as a seer, but the cyber-warfare plot of Die Hard 4.0 doesn't seem so far-fetched any more. In June, the removal of a Russian war memorial in Estonia's capital Tallinn sparked what appears to be a cyber-war waged by Russians, with Estonia's banks, political parties and government sites on the receiving end of a sustained barrage of distributed denial of service attacks. Estonian authorities claim that at least some of the attacks can be traced to the Russian security services.

While Estonian servers suffered a month-long attack, the US military reported that China was assembling a "cyber-army" to wage war digitally. According to the report, The Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2007, "People's Liberation Army authors'' often cite the need in modern warfare to control information, sometimes termed an 'information blockade'. China is pursuing this ability by improving information and operational security, developing! electronic warfare and information warfare capabilities, denial-of-IV service and deception.

So is cyber-war really happening in Estonia? Toraly Dirro is EMEA Security Strategist for McAfee AVERT Labs (www.avertlabs. com): "It's not completely clear whether there was some official motivation behind this or if it was just local hackers," he says. "We've seen purely hacker-motivated 'cyberwars' before, such as the one between Chinese and American hackers back in zoos ° Certainly, the DDoS attacks that McAfee monitors are the preserve of hackers and criminals rather than nation states. That doesn't mean countries aren't practicing cyber-war. We just don't know about it.