After three weeks of unrelenting cyber attacks, the most wired country in the West, Estonia, has returned to normality. The tiny Baltic nation has weathered an unprecedented barrage of denial of service attacks that reduced the country’s online banking system, its newspapers and government services to a crawl, knocked out thousands of commercial websites and left its 1.3 million citizens on edge.

In terms of duration and impact, the attacks, which escalated following a government decision to remove a Red Army statue from the capital, Tallinn, are unprecedented.

“This is the single biggest cyber attack by a magnitude of a hundred,” says IT security specialist Roberto Preatoni, who spends much of the year in Tallinn running Domina Security. What spooks IT security experts, not to mention EU and NATO national security officials, is the victim. If Estonia, or “E-stonia” as its fiercely proud techies refer to it, can be hacked in this way, no country is safe.

Cross-border digital warfare of the variety Estonia has experienced this month has become the standard reaction to geopolitical stand-offs dating back at least to the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. In 2001, pro-Chinese hackers knocked out two US government websites following a mid-air collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet. The September 11 attacks generated months of tit-for-tat outages and defacements, pitting pro-Muslim hackers against pro-Western hackers.

Over the years, the firepower behind the attacks has increased, as has the economic impact. Last year, virtually every website with the Danish .dk suffix wilted under a cyber blitz following the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. And, months later, the war in Lebanon triggered still more indiscriminate retaliatory assaults. Thousands of military, commercial and government websites well outside the war zone were casualties in the frighteningly broad cyber response.

Preatoni, through the operation of Zone-h, a web-based digital attack observatory he started several years ago, has drawn an unmistakeable conclusion from the carnage of downed websites and fried servers. These attacks are no longer a case of kids being kids, the digital equivalent to spray-painting graffiti on a McDonald’s storefront.

The firepower being stockpiled by these digital saboteurs, acting alone or in small groups, and perhaps with the prodding of the state, is enough to cripple large portions of the digital economy, not to mention vital government services and communications systems. Even if the outage lasts for hours or a few days, the toll can be far more devastating than a conventional military strike.

For a country like Estonia, where many citizens bank and vote online and pay for petrol or parking via mobile phones, the psychological impact of its cyber defences being overcome by an unseen enemy can have a devastating effect. They have to be wondering: is my bank account safe? Will my next e-vote be accurately counted?

To equate this to an act of war, as some of Estonia’s government officials say, is not far off the mark. The problem is that there is no clear indication who is behind the attacks. Even if the attacks could be traced back to the Kremlin, the Russians could plausibly say it wasn’t us. And what then? NATO is unequipped to come to the aid of its ally in this case. Meanwhile, the enemy, wherever they are, could be reloading for more.

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that this was the response the Estonians received following a diplomatic row with Russia. It’s no secret that many of the cyber crime tactics – from denial of service attacks to more benign website defacing – used against Estonians were perfected by Russian organised crime rings preying on online businesses of all sizes and in all territories. Russian gangsters certainly do not have the market cornered on cyber bullying, but they have had the most success with it.

E-crime has blossomed under an indifferent Russian state, critics say. What does the future hold for the wired world if the Russian state takes a more active interest?