Targeted websites included the president's (president.ee), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (vm.ee), Police and Border Guard Board (politsei.ee), digital state services portal (eesti.ee) and ID card information page (id.ee).

Attempts were also made to disrupt the websites of other state organizations. The attacks started around 4 p.m. and lasted for several hours.

The attacks and attempted attacks had little effect, only temporarily disrupting visits to some portals, said Tõnu Tammer, head of RIA's Cyber ​​Incident Handling Department (CERT-EE).

"It is likely that the attackers wanted to show how they can disturb the population during the international cyber exercise Locked Shields in Estonia. But the attacks had little effect," he said.

"Estonia's unique reputation as an e-state, strong foreign policy positions and clear condemnation of the Russian war make us a target for cyberattackers. We have taken this into account and are always ready to react to events."

RIA will continue to investigate the attacks.

This week money was allocated to the organization to increase measures to block DDoS attacks on government websites.

What is a DDoS attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices.

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