LONDON — Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world — people even vote online — but for the past three weeks the country has been under a massive cyber-attack that has disabled the Web sites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks and private companies. Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip directly accused Russia of being responsible, and appealed to the NATO alliance do something about it.
Things are getting seriously foolish in Eastern Europe.
NATO can't do anything about it, because the treaty does not currently define cyber-attacks as a military act that would allow the victim to invoke the alliance's provisions for collective defense. Besides, there is no obvious action NATO could take that would stop these attacks, which are being coordinated by Russian hackers who may or may not have been sent into action by the Russian government. And yet another reason for NATO not to get officially involved is that grownups have been conspicuously absent on both sides in this quarrel.
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