DARKMARKET

was for sartorial reasons as much as anything else that he left to run
CERT in 2006.

On the day of the virtual election in 2007, CERT and Hillar's former
colleagues in law enforcement were on high alert. ‘And sure enough,’
he explained, ‘we spotted somebody had launched a botscan on the
electoral system.’ Somebody, it seems, had sent out an automatic probe,
which was instructed to search for any ports on the electoral servers
that might have been left open by mistake. ‘This was not very serious,
as botscans are pretty easy to detect,’ Hillar continued, ‘but nonetheless
it was a genuine security threat.’

He then puffed himself up – as much as somebody as laid-back as
Hillar can – to announce proudly that ‘Fifteen minutes after we first
spotted the botscan a policeman was knocking on the door at an address
in Rapla, fifty kilometres south of Tallinn, enquiring of the inhabitant,
“Why are you running a botscan against the electoral computers?”’

In the world of cyber security, fifteen minutes from the detection of
mischief to an officer arriving at the location of the mischief-making
computer is more than impressive – it's brilliant. ‘It was lucky for us
that we had done such a good job,’ Hillar said, ‘because when the first
big attack came at the end of April, we were well prepared.’

That ‘big attack’, two months after the election, marked another
cyber ‘first’ for Estonia as it was subject to a sustained assault on its
networks, which eventually forced it to close down its Internet links
with the outside world. Some argue that this was the first-ever incidence
of cyber warfare.

I had sought out Hillar a month after my visit to Google in Silicon
Valley. My eastward journey led me to Tallinn, the picturesque capital
of the most northerly Baltic state. The wall of the old town protects a
rich mix of Scandinavian, Germanic and Slavic architectural styles.
These reflect how the past imperial aspirations of Estonia's neighbours
to the north, the east and the west finally gave way to Estonia's primary
indigenous culture just over twenty years ago, after the collapse of
communism (although Russians still make up just under a quarter of
the population).

Sitting cheek by jowl with the Orthodox, Lutheran and Catholic
churches are faux-bucolic restaurants for the tourists and, after a hearty
meal, snappy nightclubs to round the evening off with some dancing.
Estonia hosts fewer stag nights for drunken young Englishmen than