The first time in its ten-year existence, Estonian World fell victim to a cyber attack, probably perpetrated by Russian hackers due to our ongoing coverage and our profound condemnation of the unprovoked Russian war against Ukraine.
On 3 March, the Estonian World website experienced technical difficulties and was at times either very slow or inaccessible. At that time, we didn’t yet know it was a cyber attack, and we got our site working.
However, overnight 4 March, it was clear that the Estonian World website was under attack by perpetrators who had gained access to the website and installed malware on our site, which led to our hosting provider and supporter, Zone Media, taking the precautionary measure of blocking access to Estonian World.
For most of 4 March, the Estonian World website was completely inaccessible, and we apologise for that to our readers and supporters.
Thanks to the tireless work of Estonian World’s partner and IT specialist, Sander Saar, and the entire team at Zone Media, we were able to clean the site up from the installed malware, restore the content from backups and get the site live again by the evening of 4 March – or the early hours of 5 March, Estonian time.
Fortunately, none of our content was lost as Zone’s backup systems were able to restore everything we had posted prior to the cyber attack.
Estonian World would like to thank everybody who offered help to us in this crisis situation, most notably Zone Media, our own Sander Saar, our contributing author and cyber defence expert Patrik Maldre, the Estonian cyber range company CybExer, Oliver Sild and Patchstack, the Estonian Information Systems Authority, and many others. We’re deeply grateful for your help.
We will continue doing our best protecting our magazine from cyber attacks and bringing you quality coverage from the Estonian perspective.
You can support Estonian World via Patreon, Paypal or a direct bank transfer.
Read also: Live updates: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – reactions in Estonia.
