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Abstract: Estonia as a nation marks one of the most progressive adopters of information and communication technologies in all aspects of government, society and culture. While the technological progress in all domains of Estonian society is astounding, it has also created an immense cyber threat for the nation. With the advent of information systems and infrastructure to support these numerous services has come the immense increase in the attack surface for any cyber adversary or attack. In response to this, this report is dedicated to analyzing Estonia's cyber security strategy, policy and capabilities in efforts to assess Estonia's ability to effectively mitigate and defend against cyber attacks and adversaries to their information services, systems and infrastructure as well as their realized digital way of life. It is initially hypothesized that Estonia does maintain significant technical and strategic capabilities to thwart possible threats via the cyber domain but does not possess the equivalent in operational resources in order to implement such capabilities. The analysis concludes that Estonian leadership is very aware of this and understands the threats and possible consequences in establishing such avocation of information and communication technologies. Additionally, there is substantial evidence to support that Estonia has the technical capabilities and strategic acumen to effectively defend against adversarial forces targeting their information services, systems and infrastructure;while there was not sufficient proof of resources required to implement and fully utilize these capabilities.
Keywords: Estonia, cyber security, cyber policy, critical infrastructure, National Defence
1.Introduction
After restoring its independence in 1992, Estonian leadership made the assessment that the utilization of information systems and infrastructure along with the digitalization of public and private services would be the greatest chance for Estonia to make up for lost progress under their previous foreign occupation. Beginning in 1996, the Estonian government initiated its first large program to tackle technology gap titled Tiger Leap Initiative. In total, the Tiger Leap Program managed to train 10,900 teachers,61% of all teachers, introduced 61 new educational software programs, and sponsored 172 training and competition initiatives (Lopes and Theisohn ,2003) . The initiative also inspired further actions, including what became known as Tiger Tours which where started in 1998 and 1999 (Lopes and Theisohn ,2003). The Village Road programs was another initiative aimed at...