Cyber attack casts new light on Georgia invasion

While Russian tanks rolled into Georgian territory on August 8, a simultaneous 'cyber-attack' was turning Georgia's government web pages into a tangle of broken links.

Malicious technological mischief is something of a feature of Eastern European diplomatic relations. But the scale and, particularly, the timing of this cyber-attack, and the existence of a mysterious 'practice attack' a month earlier, pose important questions about the lead-up to the Russia-Georgian conflict.

The modus operandi was tried and tested, familiar to anyone who had watched the attack on Estonia's official web infrastructure in May 2007. An international network of unknowingly infected zombie computers, many of them home PCs like yours or mine, bombarded Georgian government websites with requests, in a systematic 'Distributed Denial of Service Attack'. If enough computers

want to visit a webpage at once, the server becomes overwhelmed and shuts down.

The result was a complete cessation of communication between government and people, just as the shells began to land. Other features of the attack included the creation of fake government websites, and the propagandised defacement of the Georgian parliament's site, which carried images comparing Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to Adolf Hitler. Desperate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was reduced to communicating through a Google-hosted blogging account.

Now security experts are turning their attention to what looks chillingly like a smaller-scale, 'dry run' attack that took place almost a month earlier, before the mainstream media had become aware of just how dangerous a conflict was brewing between Georgia and its giant neighbour.

A blog post on the internet