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was for sartorial reasons as much as anything else that he left to run CERT in 2006.

On the day of the virtual election in 2007, CERT and Hillar's former colleagues in law enforcement were on high alert. 'And sure enough,' he explained, 'we spotted somebody had launched a botscan on the electoral system.' Somebody, it seems, had sent out an automatic probe, which was instructed to search for any ports on the electoral servers that might have been left open by mistake. 'This was not very serious, as botscans are pretty easy to detect,' Hillar continued, 'but nonetheless it was a genuine security threat.'

He then puffed himself up – as much as somebody as laid-back as Hillar can – to announce proudly that 'Fifteen minutes after we first spotted the botscan a policeman was knocking on the door at an address in Rapla, fifty kilometres south of Tallinn, enquiring of the inhabitant, "Why are you running a botscan against the electoral computers?"'

In the world of cyber security, fifteen minutes from the detection of mischief to an officer arriving at the location of the mischief-making computer is more than impressive – it's brilliant. 'It was lucky for us that we had done such a good job,' Hillar said, 'because when the first big attack came at the end of April, we were well prepared.'

That 'big attack', two months after the election, marked another cyber 'first' for Estonia as it was subject to a sustained assault on its networks, which eventually forced it to close down its Internet links with the outside world. Some argue that this was the first-ever incidence of cyber warfare.

I had sought out Hillar a month after my visit to Google in Silicon Valley. My eastward journey led me to Tallinn, the picturesque capital of the most northerly Baltic state. The wall of the old town protects a rich mix of Scandinavian, Germanic and Slavic architectural styles. These reflect how the past imperial aspirations of Estonia's neighbours to the north, the east and the west finally gave way to Estonia's primary indigenous culture just over twenty years ago, after the collapse of communism (although Russians still make up just under a quarter of the population).

Sitting cheek by jowl with the Orthodox, Lutheran and Catholic churches are faux-bucolic restaurants for the tourists and, after a hearty meal, snappy nightclubs to round the evening off with some dancing. Estonia hosts fewer stag nights for drunken young Englishmen than

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