Estonia gets rid of Soviet monuments and raises the specter of the worst cyber attack in history

In a few days, the streets of Estonia will be clean of any Soviet-era monuments. It was his prime minister, Kaja Kallas, who announced a few days ago that all the “symbols of repression and occupation” because, since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they had become “source of growing social tensions“.

The objective of this measure is a prioriprotect the public order of the country. A small State of 1.3 million inhabitants where, today, One in every four citizens is ethnically Russian. A percentage that reaches 94% in the border city of Narva, where the first statue was removed on Friday: a Soviet T-34 tank.

However, this is not the first time that the former Soviet republic —which was occupied by Josef Stalin during World War II— decides to eliminate this type of symbols. 15 years ago he tried it and ended up becoming victim of one of the worst cyber attacks in history.

It was at the beginning of 2007, when the Estonian parliament, known as Riigikogu, approved the Prohibited Construction Law. A regulation that censored all those monuments that glorified “Nazism or the Soviet occupation” and forced the Government to withdraw them in less than a month of its entry into force.

At that time, Estonia was seeking, above all, to disassociate itself from its Soviet past, which it renounced with the declaration of independence in 1991. However, he also tried to reaffirm their western identitywhich had already begun to be built in 2004, when it joined both the European Union and NATO.

The Bronze Soldier

The Estonian Executive —under the command of Reform Party leader Andrus Ansip— He soon got down to business and announced the dismantling of a sculpture located in a central square in Tallinn that had been installed in 1947 to commemorate the Red Army soldiers who fell during World War II.

The figure, known as the Bronze Soldier or the Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn, had long been a meeting point for the country’s Russian minority on such important dates as Victory Day on May 9. However, in recent months it had been the subject of graffiti.

Therefore, when the morning of April 26 the police began to cordon off the area to make way for the bulldozers that would unpin the statue and take it to a secret location, a group of peaceful protesters gathered at the site.

During the day there were no incidents, according to the local press. But at night they joined violent groups of Russian nationalists which started serious riots throughout the city. They caused extensive damage and resulted in more than 1,300 people arrested, dozens injured and one deceased, according to the figures offered by the authorities at the time.

At the same time there was a rally in front of the Estonian embassy in Moscow. And though both protests were quelled the morning of april 27these were nothing more than a prelude to what was to come.

The cyber attacks of 2007

That same day, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, denounced an “excessive use of force by the Estonian authorities against the Russian minority” and described the withdrawal of the Bronze Soldier as “blasphemy against those who fought against Nazism “. Also, faced with the humiliation of removing the statue, Lavrov warned that “there would be serious consequences“. A threat that today is reminiscent of the one he launched at kyiv before bombing kyiv in February 2022.

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On that occasion the Russian soldiers did not even deploy on the border with Estonia. However, with the noise of the protests still in the background, the Tallinn government began to record massive failures of connection in the web pages of the main public institutions and governmental organisms.

The image of the prime minister, for example, disappeared from the headquarters on-line, and the e-mail inboxes of the ministries were filled with messages from spam until collapse.

It was apparently, as detected by the Estonian intelligence services, cyber attacks from russian servers and “of a simple nature, without great technical and organizational complexities and without the capacity to cause serious damage,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Nestor Ganuzawho was Head of Training for the NATO Cyber ​​Defense Center for four years, in an analysis published by the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies.

The cyberattacks came from Russian servers and became more sophisticated over the days

These types of attacks lasted until April 29, but far from stopping, began to refine. “They reflected a greater knowledge of the tools of cyber warfare and a more thorough coordination,” Ganuza details in his report.

The government quickly convened a special crisis team and requested technical support from NATO, but failed to quell the cyberattacks until May 18.

At that time thousands of bots infected the country’s services and prevented citizens from withdraw money from ATMs, pay your taxes or request a medical appointment online for days. State media also ran out of channels to share information, and officials had to go back to faxes and phones.

The most digitized country in Europe

Russian pirates had almost brought Estonia to a standstill. But part of its success was due to the fact that Estonia had been developing a complex and advanced network of public and private services for several years. on-line which made it highly dependent on the internet.

Already in the year 2000, Estonian citizens could Paying taxes either follow parliamentary sessions online. Since 2002, they had an electronic signature for administrative procedures and, in 2005, they were the first to vote for elections from their home computer.

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Estonian was the most digitized country in EuropeAnd that had taken its toll on him. But far from being intimidated by what was the first cyberattack perpetrated against a State, the Estonians set out to create security projects to protect their computer systems and developed a digital society that currently allows citizens to carry out 99% of interactions with the State via on-line.

Also, to prevent another cyberattack from their neighbor to the east from catching them off guard, they placed cyberspace at the center of your defense strategy national.

Estonian citizens can conduct 99% of interactions with the state online

A pioneer action if one takes into account that, at that time, NATO did not yet consider cyberspace as a domain in its Strategic Concept. Something that changed with the black episode that Estonia experienced. Based on it, the Alliance decided to consider cyberattacks as a threat to its security and that of its members.

Thanks to its rapid development in cyber defense and cyber security, Estonia is today hosting the NATO Cybersecurity Cooperative Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) and the European Union Agency for large-scale computer systems in the area of ​​internal security.

A condition that, however, has not achieved dispel fear to a new cyberattack after the removal of the Soviet monuments for the war in Ukraine. In fact, the Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, has been forced to speak out on the matter and, this Thursday, has reminded citizens through Twitter that “although the country is subject to more extensive cyber attacks, it is stronger than what it was”.

An affirmation that he has tried to endorse with facts. The same Wednesday she took off the street and moved the first of the monuments to a museum of the Soviet era and, shortly after, Luukas Ilves, Undersecretary for Digital Transformation at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, announced that it had repelled “the most extensive cyber attack since 2007”.

A group of Russian hackers known as Killnet has not been slow to claim responsibility through its Telegram account, thus distancing itself from the position adopted by the Kremlin 15 years ago, when it denied responsibility for the cyberattack against a territory that it still considers today part of its catchment area.