Estonia hit by most extensive hacker attack since 2007

Estonia became a victim of “the most extensive cyberattack” since 2007, the Baltic state’s government said on Thursday, a day after it started removing Soviet-era war monuments from public areas in the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine.

The Russia-based and pro-Russia hacker group Killnet said on the messaging app Telegram that it was responsible for Wednesday’s hacker attack and said that it blocked access to more than 200 state and private Estonian institutions.

"Yesterday, Estonia was subject to the most extensive hacker attacks it has faced since 2007," tweeted Luukas Ilves, under-secretary for digital transformation at Estonia's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications on Aug 18. He added the attacks went “largely unnoticed in Estonia” and despite “some brief and minor exceptions, websites remained fully available throughout the day”.

The hackers used a DDoS attack, which is when a network is flooded with high volumes of data that it cannot handle and results in the network being paralyzed.

Russian state-sponsored actors are continuing to strike Ukrainian entities with information-stealing malware as part of what's suspected to be an espionage operation.