| Estonian cyber protests are not over… |
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| Wednesday, 16 May 2007 | ||||
 ...And their consequences could re-echo far beyond national borders: on Tuesday, one of the biggest Estonian banks, SEB Eesti Uhispank, had to block its online banking service because of a digital attack. According to officials, such “massive cyber-attack” was launched at noon and it blocked the access to the bank’s website. As confirmed by the head of communication at the bank, Mr.Silver Vohu, "Access was restored at 2:00 pm (1100 GMT), but only for users in Estonia. Access from computers located outside Estonia will continue to be restricted for security reasons," he said. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Mr. Vohu said the attacks on SEB bank's Internet banking service had "tried to overload the website with various requests so that normal access would fail." He then got on saying that as soon as they saw the problem, bank’s security experts promptly set to work in order to restore the service and keep customer’s data safe. SEB Eesti Uhispank bank wasn’t involved in the series of attacks launched at the end of April as a protest against Estonian institutions that decided to remove a Red Army memorial. In spite of this, both bank’s officials and local police believe that this could be a further expression of the protest. As confirmed by Hillar Aarelaid, head of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the massive attack against SEB Eesti Uhispank bank was not expected to take place, but as soon as they realized what was happening, they immediately associated it to “Tallinn’s protest”. Aarelaid also underlined that this new wave of attacks is coming from "around the world," not only from Estonia and Russia, in confirmation to the fact that the Internet community is much more powerful and wide than anyone could suppose. The wave of cyber attacks that accompanied such protest provoked serious damages to Estonia, whose authorities had to urge the European Union and the NATO to take action against such warfare, the EU Business reported this morning . "Taking into account what has been going on in Estonian cyber-space, both the EU and NATO clearly need to take a much stronger approach and cooperate closely to develop practical ways of combatting cyber-attacks," Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo told AFP Tuesday. According to him, "considering the scale of damage and the way these cyber-attacks have been organised, we can compare them to terrorist activities." Estonian institutions believe that the EU and NATO have to set up a common legal basis to deal with cyber attacks, and they think that a common criteria to pursue different levels of cyber criminals is needed. NATO defence ministers will discuss cyber defence at a meeting in Brussels next June.
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