Soon after taking down Soviet monuments in a province with a large Russian ethnic population, Estonia said on Thursday that it had thwarted "the most sweeping cyber attacks since 2007".
On Wednesday, the Russian hacker collective Killnet claimed responsibility for the attack and announced that it had blocked access to more than 200 public and private institutions in Estonia, including an online citizen identity system.
An Estonian government official, however, said on Thursday that the attack had little overall impact.
“Yesterday, Estonia was subject 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.
“With some brief and minor exceptions, websites remained fully available throughout the day. The attack has gone largely unnoticed in Estonia,” he added.
A Soviet Tu-34 tank was taken off display on Tuesday in the town of Narva and placed in a museum, according to Killnet, which claimed responsibility for a strike identical to this one on Lithuania in June.
In a DDoS attack, hackers attempt to overwhelm a network with unusually large amounts of data traffic in an effort to bring it to a standstill when it is unable to handle the volume of data demanded.
After experiencing significant cyberattacks on both public and private websites in 2007, which it attributed to Russians enraged over its removal of a Soviet-era statue, Estonia attempted to strengthen cyber security.
After the Red Army monument was removed from a square in Tallinn, ethnic Russians rioted for two nights.
The Estonian government on Tuesday ordered the swift removal of all public Soviet memorials in majority Russian-speaking Narva, citing rising tensions in the town and accusing Russia of trying to exploit the past to divide Estonian society.