The Estonian Secretary of State for IT Infrastructure reports massive cyber attacks on Estonia. Public institutions and the private sector were affected.
State institutions and private sector companies have become the target of the most massive cyber attacks on Estonia since 2007. This was announced by the Estonian State Secretary for IT infrastructure, Luukas Ilves, on Twitter on Thursday morning this week. According to media reports, the attacks followed the relocation of a Soviet tank monument.
Ilves states that the attacks were ineffective, “E-Estonia” is still in operation. The E in front of the country name is intended to emphasize the advanced digitization of the country and to designate the IT infrastructure. Services were not interrupted. With a few short and minor exceptions, the websites were fully accessible throughout the day. The DDoS attacks went largely unnoticed in Estonia.
The Secretary of State also thanked the IT teams who fended off the attacks on Twitter and emphasized that he slept soundly as the government’s top IT officer. According to media reports, the pro-Russian cyber gang Killnet took responsibility for the DDoS attacks. The attackers are said to have targeted 207 websites from payment systems, banks, government institutions and public services. The cybergang has already been responsible for heavy DDoS attacks on Lithuania.
EU and NATO member Estonia is considered a pioneer of digitization in Europe. The approximately 1.3 million citizens of the country could do 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.
