Russia Opens a Cyber Front Against Georgia

08-11-2008

It's not the first time Russia has engaged in cyber warfare against its neighbors (see here), but obviously, the stakes are much higher in this instance:

The websites of Georgia's government have been under denial-of-service attacks for weeks, with Russian hackers fingered as the culprits. Those online assaults have only intensified in recent days, as a shooting war between the two countries has broken out.

Galrahn at Information Dissimenation says that "Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically." The Washington Post adds that "the Caucasus Network Tbilisi -- key Georgian commercial Internet servers -- remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors."

IntelFusion calls it a "full scale cyberwar being conducted by Russia against Georgia." As always, however, its extremely difficult to sort out which hacks are being done with government involvement, which are being done with government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government whatsoever.

Notice the opening sentence: these attacks have been underway for weeks. This only adds to the growing belief that the current Russian onslaught against Georgia was premeditated (and not a spontaneous move to defend South Ossetia, as the Russians claim).

Blog Keywords: 

Blog Posts: 

The Watchman