Estonia: Kremlin may have caused cyberattacks

Estonia's government compared recent cyberattacks against the high-tech nation's Web sites to an act of war and said Russian involvement could not be ruled out. Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo said Thursday that about 1 million computers worldwide were used over more than two weeks to cripple government and corporate sites in the Baltic country, which has been locked in a bitter dispute with Moscow over the removal of a Red Army statue from downtown Tallinn. "We identified in the initial attacks IP numbers from the Russian governmental offices," Aaviksoo told The Associated Press by telephone. "There is not sufficient evidence of a governmental role but it indicates a possibility." When Estonia first linked the attacks to Russian government computers on May 1, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the accusations, saying the attackers must have used a fake Kremlin IP address to tarnish Russian authorities.