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Estonia targeted in "cyberwar"
17/05/07 - Officials in Estonia claim that the country's websites have been under heavy attack for the past three weeks claiming Russia are behind the strikes. Sources in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, have accused Russian state computer servers of hosting the sites that the cyber warfare has been launched from.Estonian government officials want the issue to top the agenda of EU-Russia summit due to take place on 18 May.
Attacks have targeted state and commercial websites, including a number of banks, which are being bombarded by mass requests for information, overwhelming their servers.
Allegedly Estonian foreign and defence ministries and leading newspapers and banks have been targeted by denial-of-service attacks.
Estonian journalist Aet Suvari told the BBC: "A couple weeks ago when the whole thing started we had some problems in our online services and then our mail server was absolutely inundated with spam e-mails as well."
"In the past few weeks it has been quite difficult for some government officials to read their e-mails on the web, to get access to the banks."
The Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip has directly accused Russia of being responsible, blaming the government.
Currently Nato and EU internet experts are all helping to track the culprits, but officials in Estonia are reporting that they have had no co-operation from Russia
In order to prevent further attacks officials have simply blocked access to the servers from outside Estonia for some websites.
The government in Tallinn believes that the attacks have been launched after a Soviet war memorial in the capital was removed; officials in the Kremlin have denied any involvement.
The removal of the memorial triggered riots among mostly ethnic Russian living in Estonia, during which one person was killed and more than 150 injured.
There is a well developed community of hackers and computer virus-writers in Russia.
However Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC the allegations were "completely untrue".
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Published Date: 2007-05-17 15:05:57Subscribe to our RSS News feed:
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