The 2007 Estonian incident came at a time when Russian nationalists had taken to the streets in protest over the government's decision to move a Soviet war memorial. The goal of the cyberattack was to undermine the credibility of Estonia's government, said the country's defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, speaking at the IT Security Entrepreneurs forum at Stanford University on Wednesday.

The Estonian incident, along with a similar attack that coincided with Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, "brought the issue of national cybersecurity on the global political agenda," Aaviksoo said.

Nobody has definitively linked the Estonian attacks to the Russian government -- security experts have likened them to an Internet brawl fuelled by tech-savvy nationalists in online forums. But some say the incident appears at least to have had the tacit approval of Estonia's western neighbor.

The distributed denial-of-service attacks and Web defacements that disrupted the tiny Baltic country did a number on Estonia's economy. At its worst point, traffic in and out of Estonia was 400 times peak levels, overwhelming banking, online news and government communications in one of the world's most wired countries.

Other countries will almost certainly face similar incidents, Aaviksoo said.