“This may well turn out to be a watershed in terms of widespread awareness of the vulnerability of modern society,” said Linton Wells II, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration at the Pentagon. “It has gotten the attention of a lot of people.”

Most of this article consists of explaining the concept of a botnet attack. So I went searching for more substantive material.

Arbor Networks offers a brief summary; some of the tidbits show up almost verbatim in the Markoff piece. A more formal analysis is apparently still in the works.

This one is for Tom:

[Estonia] has a nearly model economy, based in large part on the teachings of Milton Friedman who favored free markets unfettered by state control.

Kevin Poulsen thinks the press is overexcited:

Here's THREAT LEVEL's top-10 favorite phrases that have surfaced in the media so far (exclamation points added):

Cyberwarfare!
Online Combat!
Cyber 'Nuclear Winter'!
Massive Panic!
Online Terrorism!
A New Battle Tactic!
Unprecedented!
An Internet Riot!
Cyber-Terrorism!
Havoc!

Details may not be forthcoming just yet:

I do not want to disclose facts that could damage operations that the people on the ground are working on. Again, this is the sad fact working with incidents like this, you just can't correct misconceptions in real-time, no matter how much you would like.

In Estonia, War Fears Turn to Cyberspace