Estonia announced on Thursday that it had thwarted ‘the most extensive cyber attack since 2007’ shortly after removing Soviet monuments in a province with a large Russian ethnic population. The Russian hacker collective Killnet claimed responsibility for the attack on Wednesday, announcing that it had blocked access to more than 200 public and private institutions in Estonia, including an online citizen identity system. According to an Estonian government official, the attack had little overall impact.
‘Yesterday, Estonia was subjected to the most extensive cyber attacks it has faced since 2007,’ tweeted Luukas Ilves, undersecretary for digital transformation at Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. According to Killnet, which claimed responsibility for a strike similar to this one in Lithuania in June, a Soviet Tu-34 tank was removed from display on Tuesday in Narva and placed in a museum.
A DDoS attack involves hackers attempting to overwhelm a network with unusually large amounts of data traffic in order to bring it to a halt when it is unable to handle the volume of data demanded. Estonia attempted to strengthen cyber security after experiencing significant cyberattacks on both public and private websites in 2007, which it attributed to Russians enraged by its removal of a Soviet-era statue. Ethnic Russians rioted for two nights after a Red Army monument was removed from a square in Tallinn.
In response to rising tensions in the predominantly Russian-speaking town of Narva, the Estonian government ordered the removal of all public Soviet memorials there on Tuesday. They also accused Russia of attempting to further divide Estonian society by exploiting the past.
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