History and stories
The weeks a whole country was knocked offline
Estonia was one of the most connected countries in Europe. In the spring of 2007, that made it a target.
1 min readStory
The short version
In 2007, waves of traffic flooded Estonia's government, banks and news sites for weeks, in one of the first attacks aimed at an entire country.
The story
In April 2007, Estonia moved a Soviet-era war memorial, the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, from the center of the capital to a military cemetery. The decision caused protests and a diplomatic dispute with Russia.
Starting on April 27, websites belonging to Estonia’s parliament, government ministries, banks, newspapers and broadcasters were hit with floods of junk traffic. These denial of service attacks overwhelmed the sites so real visitors could not reach them. Some of the traffic came from individuals. Much of it came from botnets, large networks of infected computers usually rented out for sending spam.
The attacks came in waves over several weeks. Who was behind them was disputed, and only one person in Estonia was convicted. The episode led NATO to set up a cyber defense center in Tallinn.
Why it mattered
Some observers said the attacks were more sophisticated than anything seen before. Besides the NATO center, they led to the Tallinn Manual, a study of how international law applies to cyber conflict, and pushed military organizations around the world to take network security more seriously.
The lesson today
Estonia had moved much of daily life online, so losing those sites hurt. Most businesses now depend on the internet in the same way. Denial of service attacks are one reason for an outage. Provider faults and cut cables are more common. In every case, knowing what still works offline and having another way to connect keeps the business running.
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