Internet
Estonia reports massive cyber attacks
Workers remove a Soviet T-34 tank placed as a memorial in Narva, Estonia. The prime minister justified the dismantling by saying that the monument posed a threat to public order. photo
© Sergei Stepanov/AP/dpa
Estonia recently had a Soviet tank memorial dismantled near the Russian-Estonian border town of Narva for security reasons. A storm of cyber attacks on the institutions followed immediately.
In Estonia, state institutions and private companies have become targets of hacker attacks after a Soviet tank monument was relocated. The country was exposed to the “most extensive cyber attacks since 2007” on Wednesday, said State Secretary for IT infrastructure, Luukas Kristjan Ilves, on Twitter on Thursday.
However, the so-called denial-of-service attacks were “ineffective” and “largely went unnoticed”. According to media reports, the Russian hacker group Killnet is said to have acknowledged this.
In the case of denial-of-service attacks, the affected server can only be accessed to a limited extent or not at all due to an artificially high demand. According to the government, the websites functioned throughout the day with “minor exceptions”. “E-Estonia is up and running,” wrote Ilvey. Estonia likes to call itself “E-Estonia”. The EU and NATO member is considered a pioneer of digitization in Europe. The approximately 1.3 million citizens can take care of almost all administrative procedures via the Internet.
On Tuesday, Estonia had a Soviet tank monument dismantled near the Estonian-Russian border town of Narva and moved to a museum. A large Russian minority lives in the Baltic state.
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