In May 2007, the websites of a number of prominent Estonian politicians were attacked and crippled for several weeks. The attacks came at a time when Estonian/Russian relations were already chilly, thanks in part to the Estonian government's plan to move a Russian war memorial statue from the city center and into a cemetery. Ars has covered the issue since the attacks began, including the arrest of an Estonian student last year in connection with the prolonged DDoS siege. The arrest of 20-year-old Dmitri Galushkevich in January, 2008 raised doubts as to whether he was solely responsible for weeks of disruptions. On Wednesday, January 11, the doubters were victorious; comments from Konstantin Goloskokov, a commissar with the Russian youth movement Nashe, has admitted that the group organized and masterminded the Estonian barrage.

The Baltic Business News quotes Goloskokov defending the group's actions as necessary in order to defend Russian interests. "I wouldn't have called it a cyber attack; it was cyber defense," Goloskokov said. "We taught the Estonian regime the lesson that if they act illegally, we will respond in an adequate way." Note that the commissar does not characterize his own group's actions as illegal—on the contrary, it was actually Estonia's fault that it couldn't handle the impact of the DDoS assault. "We just visited the various Internet sites, over and over, and they stopped working... We didn't block them: they were blocked by themselves because of their own technical limitations in handling the traffic they encountered."

Goloskokov has something of a technical point, since the attacks that brought the Estonian government's servers down consumed relatively low bandwidth, but a DDoS attack is defined by its characteristics and success, not a certain arbitrary bandwidth floor. Nashe (also spelled Nashi) translates into "Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement "Ours!") and has been compared by some to the Communist-era youth party branch known as Komsomol. Nashi is much smaller than this predecessor organization; Wikipedia estimates its membership at some 120,000 members aged 17-25 in 2007.

Goloskokov's admission of guilt was accompanied by further denials that the Russian government had anything to do with the Estonian attacks. We've discussed "hacktivism" before at Ars, but the fact that the attack was coordinated by a government-sponsored youth organization suggests that the government was aware of what was happening, at least at some level.

With the perpetrators unmasked, the more important question is whether or not Russian authorities will actually take any actions to censure Nashi or Goloskokov himself. It would also behoove the Estonian government to release additional information on the case against Dmitri Galushkevich. Was he actually working with Nashi in attempting to bring down the Estonian sites, or was he an independent protestor who got wind of what was happening abroad and decided to launch a little home-grown protest of his own?