Estonia was a highly wired society, but its ability to function as such was nearly brought to a halt in less than a month because of three waves of cyber attacks between April 26 and May 18, 2007, likely carried out by Russian agents. These attacks, more than recent attacks on private noncritical corporations such as Sony Pictures Entertainment, represent another type of gray area between war and peace, raising novel issues about civil-military roles and the inadequacy of the law underpinning this area. Widespread dependence on the internet combined with serious hardware and software flaws and overall system weakness made for a compounded vulnerability of an entire nation. Repeated attacks on banks and other commercial operations in the United States and Europe, and even more serious, cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, underscore the blurred line between economic crimes and something closer to outright hostilities.

One of the relatively unsophisticated methods used with success during these attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), “overloads a victim's server by exploiting communication protocols,” transmitting a false address to a server, which then overloads the system by trying to respond, crowding out other legitimate requests. “Ping” attacks were also launched – or attacks that flooded the system with more information than it could handle. The successive waves of attacks crashed Estonia's internet system, leaving the government – including the president, parliament, police, and military – unable to communicate. The country's entire banking system had to shut down. Computers used in the attack were traced to 178 countries. The scope of global participation was breathtaking at the time.

The effects of the attack on Estonia do not appear to be proportional to their cause, which indicates how easily petty disputes can lead to serious consequences in the cyber age. The Estonian government had removed a Russian, Soviet-era statue of the Bronze Soldier from its central location in Tallinn and exhumed an adjacent war grave containing the remains of twelve Soviet soldiers and moved them all to a remote cemetery on the outskirts of the country's capital. Verbal attacks from Russia against the Estonian government followed; the discontent suggested that the source of the cyber attack was from Russia as well. Yet it took longer than the two weeks the attacks lasted to pinpoint their source: most likely the Russian government–sponsored youth group, Nashe.