Estonia is to raise the issue of how to handle cyber-attacks against state computer systems in meetings with partner member states of the NATO military alliance and European Union, officials said Friday. "If the ports of a NATO member country are under attack, it is considered an attack against the whole of NATO, and the military alliance comes to help," Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said.
"We will raise the handling of cyber attacks with EU defence ministers when we meet in Brussels on Monday. We also need a discussion with NATO member countries about how to handle malicious attacks against state websites," Aaviksoo said.
Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip claimed early this month, after a row blew up with Russia over the removal of a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn, that attacks had been launched against Estonian government servers, forcing them to shut down temporarily.
Some of the cyber-attacks had come from computers in the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said.
