The shame file: five evil uses of IT

In April, 2007, a three-week wave of distributed denial of service attacks took the websites of Estonian Government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies offline.

DDoS attacks take Estonia offline

The cyberattacks were prompted by the country's relocation of the Soviet World War II memorial on April 27 that sparked violent protests in the country's capital, Tallinn.

They began with a 200-fold surge in traffic to Estonian websites, overcrowding the servers' bandwidth capacity by demanding four million packets a second.

The Nashi youth movement in Russia claimed responsibility for the attacks, which ranged from ping floods to botnet spam.

Estonia is considered one of the world's most wired nations, with a reported 40 percent of its citizens reading an online newspaper daily, and more than 90 percent of bank transactions online.

The attacks and their impact prompted NATO to develop a cyber defence policy that was adopted early last year, and to establish a Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallin, which is dedicated to research and training on cyberwarfare.

"The need for a cyber-defence centre is compelling," said General James Mattis, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, at the signing ceremony. "It will help NATO defy and successfully counter the threats in this area."

Read on for three more "evil uses of IT"...