The month-long series of coordinated attacks against Estonia’s Internet in 2007 that shutdown websites of Estonia’s government, those of its officials, banks and news agencies are believed to be based by various physiological principles including anonymity and contagion.

The paper titled, “Storming the Servers: A Social Psychological Analysis of the First Internet War,” is written by Rosanna E. Guadagno, Ph.D. (Department of Psychology, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama), Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. (Department of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona), and Gadi Evron (CircleID) of The Yuval Ne’eman Tel Aviv Workshop for Science, Technology and Security, The Harold Hartog School of Government & Policy, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.

From the abstract:

In April 2007, the First Internet War began. Owing to the relocation of a World War II—era Soviet war memorial in Estonia, angry protestors, primarily of Russian descent, engaged in a month-long series of coordinated online attacks on Estonia’s Internet infrastructure that disabled it for several days. We analyze this real-world event from a social psychological perspective. Specifically, we review the details surrounding the event and examine why protest manifested in this form of online attack and discuss how it was successfully orchestrated from a framework provided by social psychology, the science of human social interaction. We argue that the psychological principles of loss, relative anonymity of online interaction, group membership and adherence to group norms, social validation, and contagion all contributed to the success of the attacks.

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