Estonia says it suffered cyber attack after removing Soviet monuments

Estonia has repelled “the most extensive cyberattacks since 2007” shortly after removing Soviet monuments in an ethnically Russian-majority region, the government said on Thursday.

Russian hacker group Killnet claimed responsibility for the attack, claiming on its Telegram account on Wednesday that it had blocked access to more than 200 Estonian state and private institutions, such as an online citizen identification system, for example. .

However, an Estonian government official said Thursday that the impact of the attack was limited. “Yesterday, Estonia was the target of the most extensive cyberattacks it has faced since 2007,” Luukas Ilves, Undersecretary for Digital Transformation at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, posted on social media.

“With a few brief, minor exceptions, the sites remained fully available throughout the day. The attack went unnoticed in the country,” she added.

Killnet, which claimed a similar assault on Lithuania in June, said it acted after a Soviet Tu-34 tank was removed from public display in the city of Narva to a museum on Tuesday.

The type of attack was DDoS, in which hackers attempt to flood a network with exceptionally high volumes of data traffic to bring it to a halt when it can no longer handle the requested data scale.

The government on Tuesday ordered the swift removal of all Soviet public memorials in the city of Narva, where the majority of the population speaks Russian. The justification was the growing tension in the region, accusing Russia of trying to exploit the past to divide Estonian society.

Estonia has been working to increase cybersecurity since 2007, when it suffered extensive attacks on public and private websites. The reason given by the local government at the time was irritation at the removal of a Soviet-era statue. The Red Army monument was removed from a square in Tallinn, followed by two nights of riots by ethnic Russians.