A Kremlin spokesman on May 17 refuted allegations of Moscow's involvement in the recent large-scale cyber attacks on Estonia's government and private-sector websites that have been continuing since late April.
Deputy press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov said Russia can in no way be involved in cyber-terrorism and all claims to the contrary are an absolute lie, BBC Russian Service reported.
The official website of the Russian president is the target of hundreds of attacks every day, Peskov countered, and IP addresses of the computers from which they come implicate many countries in all parts of the world.
"This by no means suggests that governments of other countries are behind such attacks," he said, pointing at the possibility of faking IP addresses.
The barrage of cyber attacks on Estonia, which started after a bitter row erupted between Moscow and Tallinn over the April 27 removal of the Bronze Soldier monument from Tallinn's city center, has raised concern among Estonia's western allies and has prompted NATO to dispatch some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defenses.
Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said in a statement at the beginning of May that it had been established that the attacks had been made from IP addresses of concrete computers and by concrete individuals from Russian government bodies including the administration of the president of the Russian Federation.
The Kremlin has in return accused the Baltic states of assaulting President Vladimir Putin's website. An unnamed source with the president's administration told Russian news agency RIA Novosti that an offensive on May 3 was unprecedented in scale and the servers involved appeared to be situated in the Baltic states.