In April 2007, Russia-based attackers launched a series of denial of service attacks against Estonian public and private sector organizations in response to the government's removal of a Soviet war monument from downtown Tallinn. For three weeks, threat actors targeted state and commercial websites, ranging from foreign and defense ministries to banks and media outlets, by overloading their bandwidth and flooding their servers with junk traffic, rendering them inaccessible to the public. In order to mitigate the onslaught, Estonia briefly closed its digital borders and blocked all international web traffic. This series of denial of service operations in Estonia in 2007 was the first time that a foreign actor threatened another nation’s security and political independence primarily through cyber operations.