A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.
While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians’ removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.
Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
”This is an operational security issue, something we’re taking very seriously,” said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. ”It goes to the heart of the alliance’s modus operandi.”
Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised on Friday at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.
While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.
If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.
Relations between the Kremlin and the West are at their worst for years, with Russia engaged in bitter disputes not only with Estonia, but with Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Georgia — all former parts of the Soviet Union or ex-members of the Warsaw Pact. The electronic offensive is making matters much worse.
Estonia, a country of 1,4-million people, including a large ethnic Russian minority, is one of the most wired societies in Europe and a pioneer in the development of ”e-government”. Being highly dependent on computers, it is also highly vulnerable to cyber-attack.
The main targets have been the websites of the Estonian presidency and its Parliament; almost all of the country’s government ministries; political parties; three of the country’s six big news organisations; two of the biggest banks; and firms specialising in communications. It is not clear how great the damage has been.
The cyber-attacks were clearly prompted by the Estonians’ relocation of the Soviet World War II memorial on April 27. Ethnic Russians staged protests against the removal, during which 1 300 people were arrested, 100 people were injured, and one person was killed.
The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that some attackers were identified by their internet addresses — many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.
Without naming Russia, the Nato official said: ”I won’t point fingers. But these were not things done by a few individuals.
”This clearly bore the hallmarks of something concerted.” — Â