During local elections, the situation in cyberspace was calm. In the first few days, short-lived denial-of-service attacks were made against election-related websites, but they had no impact. The i-voting and the election information system functioned without technical problems.
October was International Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and to mark the occasion, RIA called on business leaders to take responsibility for cybersecurity. Dorel Albin, analyst of the Analysis and Prevention Department, emphasised that cyber security is not just something for the IT department to deal with; instead, company management should regularly contribute to raising the cyber awareness of employees and the security of systems. ‘We recommend that company managers familiarise themselves with the materials available in the itvaatlik.ee portal, which contains practical advice and videos for both companies and private individuals. In addition, we recommend reading the cybersecurity quick guide for companies and taking the cyber test,’ added Albin.
Major cyber incidents:
On 4–5 October, four brief denial-of-service attacks against the state portal eesti.ee were registered. Due to the protective measures in place, the attacks had no significant impact.
On 14 October, a network device failure caused a temporary interruption at the Jõhvi centre of the Emergency Response Centre, resulting in calls being redirected to other centres. Operations were restored in less than an hour.
In the morning of 30 October, the use of Mobile-ID and Smart-ID was disrupted for approximately 20 minutes in Estonia and Lithuania – the incident was caused by an attack against the service.
Various telephone scams are still widespread, with callers pretending to represent banks, Elektrilevi, or the Health Insurance Fund, for example. RIA warns that no government agency or bank will ever ask for passwords or PINs over the phone. If you receive a suspicious phone call, you should simply hang up.
Elsewhere in the world, Cybersecurity Awareness Month included several attacks. In early October, Latvia was hit by a wave of large-scale denial-of-service attacks, causing several government and municipal websites to be temporarily unavailable. According to Latvian CERT experts, the attacks were well coordinated and the attackers tried to adapt to the security measures as they were being implemented.
The social media platform Discord announced that hackers managed to steal the data of approximately 70,000 users, including names, Discord usernames, and documents submitted for age verification.
On 20 October, a failure at a data centre of Amazon caused a widespread outage that affected thousands of businesses and services around the world. It is now known that the root cause was a failure in the automation of a name server management system, which took Amazon’s critical DynamoDB database offline. The outage affected banks, airlines, entertainment platforms, and logistics companies globally for up to 14 hours, with losses estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
Read more about these incidents in the RIA monthly summary: https://www.ria.ee/en/situation-cyberspace-october-2025.
