Traffic from the Yandex network to Estonian websites has almost disappeared, ERR News reports, citing the Information System Authority (RIA). By October 13 the average number of requests from Yandex was about 420 times lower than the September average, a fall of 99.8 percent.
The drop followed Ukrainian strikes last week on three Yandex data centers: one near Moscow, one in Sasovo and one in Kaluga. Yandex suspended operations at the site near Moscow after it was damaged by a drone.
RIA analyst Simon Berner cautioned against reading the figure as a change in the threat to Estonia. In his assessment it is too early to say whether Russian cyberattacks have changed, and there is no reason to assume they will become less frequent. "Various infrastructures are used to carry out attacks, and these do not depend on the functioning of Yandex services,"
he said.
Foreign media have linked the strikes to a setback for Russian online influence operations, including bot activity. RIA told ERR News that monitoring such activity is outside its remit, so it can neither confirm nor refute those reports. Yandex taxi services were banned in Estonia shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Source: ERR News, . The text above is our own summary; the words in quotation marks are the source's.
What this means for an Estonian entrepreneur
For an Estonian company the practical point is in RIA's caution: a sharp fall in traffic from one network does not make attacks less likely, because attackers use other infrastructure. A business should not relax its own protection on the strength of this figure. Firms that depend on outside IT providers have the most reason to keep their own list of those providers and their backup plans current.
For a regulated financial company we build the ICT risk framework, the incident procedure and the register of outside IT providers that DORA requires. DORA ICT risk management framework