NATO nations have sent experts to
Estonia to help it combat a wave of cyber-attacks this month, a spokesman for the military allies said Wednesday, but he could shed no light on who the culprits were.
“The Estonians asked NATO for two things: one was political solidarity, and they got it, and second, technical assistance, and they got that too,” the spokesman, James Appathurai, told reporters in Brussels.
He said the 26-country military alliance had sent an expert, as had the U.S. military’s European command, and that “many other nations” had sent people from their defense ministries.
The Baltic EU and NATO member began barring access to key government and some private websites three weeks ago after it came under a barrage of attacks, often from abroad.
The cyber-attacks were triggered by the Estonian authorities’ decision to remove a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn, a move that angered Russia and the large ethnic Russian minority in Estonia.
Officials, including Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, have claimed that some of the cyber-attacks came from Russian government computers, including in the office of President Vladimir Putin.
But Appathurai could not say who was responsible.
“Those attacks continue, they go up and down, but they have not stopped,” he said, adding that they “are very hard to trace in any sort of definitive way.”
Appathurai noted that Estonia — which he said was sometimes referred to as E-stonia for its highly computer literate society — was “quite capable of defending themselves.”
NATO defense ministers agreed on Thursday that fast action was needed to tackle the threat of "cyber attacks" on key Internet sites after Estonia suffered a wave of assaults on its computer networks last month.
