Baltic States – CIS, Internet, Latvia, Legislation, Security, Technology

The hacker group "Anonymous Ukraine" is believed to have organized a series of cyber attacks that occurred during "Steadfast Jazz 2013".

CERT.LV has recorded cyber attacks from IP addresses in ten countries during the military exercise, with many coming from Russia. Part of the attacks came from servers that had already been compromised. CERT.LV, in cooperation with foreign colleagues, was able to take timely preventive action and halt the attacks.

In the cyber-attacks, the hackers attempted to post misleading information in Latvian on-line media web-sites about NATO, thus attempting to discredit the alliance as well as the exercises themselves.

According to CERT.LV, part of the attacks was targeted at public administration websites, whereas the other part – at websites not associated with the public sector. CERT.LV has found that the hackers chose to attack websites that were run using vulnerable content management systems.

While most of the websites attacked by the hackers were simply defaced, the Defense Ministry's website was targeted by a service denial attack, which was successfully deflected by the ministry's experts. As a result, although the website did become slower, access to the website was not denied.

CERT.LV coordinated the monitoring of the cyber-attacks with colleagues in Lithuania and Estonia. ''We came to the conclusion that many of the cyber-attacks observed came from IP addresses in Russia, however, this does not mean that the organizers of the attacks come from Russia as well,'' the report points out.

As reported, the number of cyber attacks and attempted cyber attacks against Latvia and other Baltic countries increased rapidly during the ''Steadfast Jazz 2013'' military exercise.