Estonia has urged its allies in the European Union and NATO to take firm action against a new mode of warfare that has been unleashed on the Baltic state in a bitter row with Russia over a Soviet war memorial: cyber-attacks.
"Taking into account what has been going on in Estonian cyber-space, both the EU and NATO clearly need to take a much stronger approach and cooperate closely to develop practical ways of combatting cyber-attacks," Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo told AFP Tuesday.
"Considering the scale of damage and the way these cyber-attacks have been organised, we can compare them to terrorist activities," Aaviksoo said a day after raising the new mode of warfare at talks with his fellow EU defence ministers in Brussels.
Estonian institutional websites have been under regular cyber-attack since the end of last month, when a row blew up with Russia over the removal from central Tallinn of a memorial to Soviet Red Army soldiers.
Officials in Estonia, including Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, have claimed that some of the cyber-attacks, which forced the authorities in the Baltic state to temporarily shut down websites, came from Russian government computers, including in the office of President Vladimir Putin.
"The cyber-attacks against government websites have come in waves: they start and end, and then start again after a few days' break," said Hillar Aarelaid, head of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), which was set up last year to tackle "security incidents" in Estonia's .ee Internet domain.
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I wonder what Russia's official response is to these claims?? Anyone?
Thanks to my friend, Fergie, for the link early this morning.
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