R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

Georgia gets allies in Russian cyberwar

Estonia and Poland offer assistance

Iain Thomson in San Francisco, vnunet.com 12 Aug 2008

Georgia is gaining allies to resist online attacks, which it says are the work of Russian hackers.

Two members of Estonia’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) are heading to Georgia to help deal with the attacks, according to Baltic Business News. The attacks in Georgia are reportedly similar to those that took place against Estonia last year.

Poland and Estonia have both also offered web space to the Georgian government to host official pages.

"The internet is a critical resource not only for government ministries, but also in assisting the running of countries, and such disruption can damage economies and impact the running of services," said Greg Day, security analyst from McAfee.

"It is very interesting that Georgia has turned to using the Google Blogger service as a method of communication during such an attack and it has proved to be a sustainable resource. Governments will need to have strategies in place to prepare for this type of attack."

Ever since the invasion of South Ossetia Georgian servers have been under attack, with government web pages defaced and servers crashed by distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS).

However, Georgian hackers have responded, attacking local government sites in South Ossetia and Russia.

"We are witnessing in this crisis the birth of true, operational cyber warfare," said Eli Jellenc, manager of All-Source Intelligence at iDefense.

"The use of cyber attack assets in conjunction with kinetic military operations in the current crisis now stands among the most significant developments ever seen in the field of information security or cyber conflict studies."

"Moreover, that the attackers are mostly decentralised civilians suggests that the evolution of political and strategic hacking will be messier and more disruptive than even pessimistic strategic theorists have supposed."