RUSSIA'S STATE-LICENSED hacker forces have opened a new front in the east-west cyber war with an unprecedented mass cyber-attack on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American-financed radio station broadcasting from Prague to Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

The attack began last weekend with a "tsunami" of bogus connection requests, which blocked some of the radio station's internet websites and caused many others to crash. In turn, this frontal cyber-attack also affected the radio's broadcast services to some 20 countries in the region. When RFE took electronic counter-measures the cyber-attacks intensified.

Significantly, Prague sources point out, RFE/RL's broadcasts to Belorussia, Russia, Iran, Bosnia and Kosovo were the target services quickly rendered inaccessible. A further tranche of disabled services include Azerbaijan and Tadjikistan, which have friendly links with the West but, in the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's policy-makers, belong to Russia's sphere of influence.

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advertisementCyber-assaults and hacker raids are virtual arms, but, in effect, they are real offensive weapons. Cyber-attacks can harm or even paralyse a country and are therefore the equivalents of physical military attacks. Nato's defensive treaty, drawn up in 1949, does not deal with this new-fangled weapon as there was no internet and very few computers at the time.

During the cold war there had been many Soviet attempts to jam the signals of RFE/RL, funded by Washington "to promote democratic values and institutions by disseminating factual information and ideas" in the communist empire. The present cyber attack on it is merely a continuation of this old cold war by more up-to-date means. How this virtual reality cyber-weapon was being used by the Russian hackers in last week's attack on the radio station is of considerable interest. At the height of the attack RFE/RL's websites received up to 50,000 fake requests for information, "hits" in cyber-language, every second. Cyberspace experts call this "denial-of-service attack" or DOS. According to Luke Springer, RFE/RL's head of technology, the attack initially targeted the radio station's Belorussian service, perhaps because of the radio's marking of the anniversary of the 1987 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Belorussia. However, the attack quickly spread to other news sites.

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