Estonia, a small country in northern Europe, is a country that promotes extensive usage of Internet which includes online voting and online tax filing.
However, this tiny country experienced the first war in cyberspace, when it was attacked by some pro-Russia supporters after it removed a bronze statue of a World war 2-era Soviet soldier from a park. The war turned digital which caused a national security situation in Estonia.
The attack shut down the country's digital infrastructure, clogging the websites of the president, prime minister, Parliament and government agency (Distributed Denial-of-Services), shutting down the biggest bank in Estonia for an hour of its online banking causing its to lose around US$1 million, and overwhelming the sites of several newspapers in Estonia.
Arbor Networks measured dozens of attacks. The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.
This turned out to be the largest cyberattack on a single country!
This interesting article from TheNewYorkTimes Technology can be found here - War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia.
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