Georgia Under Online Assault
By Noah Shachtman August 10, 2008 | 12:29:00 PMCategories: Crazy Ivans, Info
War
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 Russian government involvement, which are being done with
government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government
whatsoever.
UPDATE: Everyone from Google to the Estonian government is now pitching in, to
give Georgia a hand.
