Cyber attacks, NATO – and Angry Birds
In April 2007, Estonia, a country of just over a million people,
was hit by a major cyber attack.
Banks, broadcasters and government organisations,
were just some of those, whose systems were attacked.
Six years later, we asked the country’s president
what it has learned about cyber security and who is best to provide it.
Mister President, do you think that in order to gain more prominence
something more serious, such as taking control of plains
or bringing some deaths about by cyber attacks,
will be needed before this is taken seriously?
Well, if someone wipes out the records of Wall Street
no one has to die directly as a result of it, but that can be pretty bad.
And I would just suggest any politician that says:
No one has been killed, fine, that’s true and let’s hope it stays that way,
but your country’s banks have just lost all of their financial data.
Cyber attacks have become even more high profile recently
with the attack in South Korea. Do you feel that NATO is in a position
to defend its own members.
If you completely paralyse the country
and then nothing is moving, there is no phone service,
there is no food coming to the supermarkets,
the hospitals are not working... I mean, what good does an army do?
I mean, in fact the army doesn’t know who to fight.
How much do you think
that the cyber community will wait for institutional responses?
And how much a grassroots response is more likely,
which you have evidence of in Estonia with the defence team?
We had this idea: maybe people might want to volunteer to do this?
And so we offered this programme
whereby people who work in the private sector and IT
can volunteer their services just like national or home guard does.
You know, just a couple of hours a week,
a couple of weekends a month or a weekend a month.
And as it turned out this has been hugely popular because...
Well, I mean, if you’re a computer geek somewhere,
you’re making a lot of money, but what you’re doing is not necessarily...
You’re not serving the country.
We have this overwhelmingly popular response.
People who want to donate their time.
And they do get a benefit because they have to go through...
to obtain a security clearance. So, if you’re in the private sector
and you’re sort of designing... whatever, Angry Birds.
We have a lot of people who design Angry Birds within Estonia.
You think: you can defend your country and get a NATO clearance
because otherwise we won’t let you do it.
Wow, I have a NATO security clearance.
It works.
And with the end of the Afghanistan operation next year,
do you feel this is an opportunity
to push these kind of security threats more to the front?
I think the issues that we faced in 2001 to 2002
have been superseded today. Cyber defence was not at all an issue.
I mean, the world was not wired enough in 2001, 2002
for say DDOS attacks to really have a meaningful effect,
whereas today DDOS attacks are regular occurrence.
And I do think this is a mind-set issue. That will change
as we get more and more people rising up
who have had experience with cyber.