Storming the Servers: A Social Psychological Analysis of the First Internet War

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.