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The Lawfare Podcast

Episode #9: The President of Estonia Speaks on Cybersecurity

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.76.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2012

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves talks to Jack about cybersecurity and the 2007 attacks on his country's computer networks.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:07.2

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0:16.8

LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair

0:25.6

no bull, and the aftermath.

0:44.5

Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis. Our subject today is Jack's

0:51.6

interview with the president on cyber security. Okay, it was the president of the tiny nation

0:58.1

of Estonia, but still this is heady stuff. Tumas Hendrick Ilvis was president of Estonia

1:05.1

as he still is back in 2007 when it famously suffered a massive denial of service attack

1:12.0

emanating primarily from Russia on its government, banking, and other important websites. Ilvis

1:18.4

speaks flawless English, having grown up in New Jersey, and he's an expert in cyber security,

1:24.3

not only because of the 2007 attacks and their aftermath, but dating back to his computer

1:29.7

programming training in middle school and his leadership of Estonia's 1996 Tiger Leap

1:35.9

project that set Estonia on the path of digital sophistication that has made it one of the

1:41.7

most wired countries in the world. He spoke last week at Jack's International Cybersecurity

1:47.4

class at the Kennedy School, and before the lecture, he sat down for this interview.

1:52.4

So, reflecting on the last four years, what would you say the main lessons you and your

1:58.3

country have learned from the 2007 episode?

2:01.0

Another trivial, trivial that the attack took.

2:04.0

It's just DDoS attacks. I mean, it doesn't really, I mean, the sense of it was unique

2:10.3

and new, sitting in that there had never been this level of DDoS attacks at a government

2:19.7

at a country, right? So, if it's at a country that's different than do you do it for extortion,

2:30.7

and for that, I think it's just progress. So, in the Small Wars Journal of January 2011,

...

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