An activist with a pro-Kremlin youth group has admitted that he and his friends were behind the attack on Estonia two years ago that paralyzed the NATO state's Internet network, Reuters reports.
Estonia, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, blamed the Russian government for the attack at the time,. Moscow deniedit. The incident prompted the NATO military alliance to review its readiness to defend against cyber-warfare.
Konstantin Goloskokov, an activist with Russia's Nashi youth group and aide to a pro-Kremlin member of parliament, said he had organised a network of sympathisers who bombarded Estonian internet sites with electronic requests, causing them to crash.
Reuters adds that he said the action was a protest against the dismantling in 2007 of a Soviet-era monument to the Red Army from a square in the centre of Estonia's capital Tallinn. The removal prompted two nights of rioting by mainly Russian-speaking protesters.
The 22-year-old Goloskokov told Reuters in a telephone interview, 'What I did and what my friends did was no kind of attack, it was an act of civil disobedience, absolutely legal."