During the 2013 Eurovision song contest, the Lithuanian websiteDelfi.lt revealed rigged voting from Lithuania giving extra votes to Russia. Obviously it is not cricket and not a good omen for Lithuania which will take over the EU presidency soon…
Source (photo): http://www.ledauphine.com
The revelation of such news had relative impacts on the Internet in Lithuania.
Indeed, a threatening email was sent to editors of the DELFI website jeopardising them if they did not remove the article dealing with the vote-rigging scandal of the Eurovision song contest. However, the editors decided not to budge. As a consequence, DELFI was subjected to a “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attack, which means a great deal of bogus requests made the web pages and other services which are hosted on the targeted servers not available to the rest of the world.
According to Vytautas Bučinskas (director of the risk management unit at TEO, a subsidiary of TeliaSonera and owner of Hostex), this attack was significant. Hostex is the Internet service provider for DELFI and a lot of other Lithuanian websites. During the attack, Vytautas Bučinskas said that there were around 50 million requests for the server in a couple of minutes. In other words, the data flow was as big as six gigabits per second. On top of that, there have been connections from a large number of countries such as Russia, Japan, Turkey and Brazil making it difficult to trace the origin of the DDOS attacks.
Lithuania is to take over the EU presidency for 6 months. The significant number of cyber-attacks puts an emphasis on the importance of tackling the issue of cyber threats. That is why Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Vice-Minister Vytautas Leskevicius pointed out that Lithuania will pay particular attention to cyber security during the EU presidency. Estonia and its NATO Cyber Security Center is a new way of fighting hackers. This may give food for thought for a lot of countries…Warding off a possible hacking attack in the future is essential. Consequently, for the vice minister of Lithuania, the digital program is one of the most important priorities for the Lithuanian EU stint.
However, Arturas Paulauskas (chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee) worries that, during the EU Council presidency, cyber-attacks may occur for the mere reason that there is not enough money to beef up around-the-clock e-security like during Spain’s EU presidency when the official EU presidency website was hacked. Currently, the functioning e-security body in Lithuania, CERT-LT, is not capable of providing abiding security for all digital systems owing to the fact that it does not possess enough manpower to work for 24 hours.
That is the reason why Lithuanians want their own government to do more to improve the country’s resilience. As far as DDOS attacks are concerned, a bit more money would probably do the trick to cope with them. The problem with delfi.lt makes it clear that it is now urgent to open discussions about ways to prevent cyber invasions…
