Russian Army Analyst to the World: You are defenseless against a cyber attack

Surprising, but true, the Russian militarists seeing a sign of weakness in the reaction of NATO to the cyber threat are coming closer to actually claiming responsibility for April and May Cyber Assault on Estonia. Even more, one of them is threatening NATO with such cyber attack inflicting "enormous losses" on the West.

According to one of the major Russian news outlets, Gazeta, which is associated with the British papers The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, colonel Anatoly Cyganok, the head of the Russian Army Centre For Military Forecast (In Russian: Центр военного прогнозирования) made the following comment:

"Руководитель российского Центра военного прогнозирования полковник Анатолий Цыганок считает, что кибератаки против Эстонии не нарушали никаких международных договоренностей, потому что таковых просто нет. "Эти атаки были вполне успешными, и сегодня альянсу нечего противопоставить российским виртуальным атакам, - заявил Цыганок в интервью «Газете». - В принципе потери вооружений НАТО могут быть огромными, если в результате таких атак вывести из строя компьютерное военное управление»"

"The head of Russian Centre For Military Forecast Anatoly Cyganok says that the cyber attacks against Estonia did not break any international agreements because no such agreements exist. "These attacks were quite successful and today the alliance (NATO) has nothing to put against them," - Mr Cyganok said in the interview to "Gazeta". "If as the result of such attacks computerized military control were disabled the NATO military equipment losses would in principle be enormous."

Colonel is coming as close as possible to what Estonia has been saying for months - Russia is behind the attacks. This statement, together with the previous one by a high ranking Russian military official disclosing the existence of the cyber weapons program (see quotations from the Russian press in this blog) underlines the naivety of those few analysts looking for a cheap sensation like placing the blame for the whole saga on a lone hacker in Estonia, as more and more evidence of Russia's involvement emerge.

True, all the existent evidence is circumstantial. It is going to stay this way as Russia is not responding to the joint investigation requests and most of the places and persons wanted by the investigation are in Russia, except the one unfortunate Sergey, Ivan or whatever his name, apprehended in Estonia, who probably worked just as the fire corrector for the main hacker groups, feeding them the necessary IP addresses from inside a foreign language segment of the internet.