security website Shadowserver, dated July 20, describes a period of more than 24 hours in which "the website of President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (www.president.gov.ge)" was "rendered unavailable due to a multi-pronged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack."

Sinister? Certainly. A team of experts tracked the 'command and control' server ­ which aimed and coordinated the attack ­ to a location in the US. It had apparently become active only weeks previously, and was believed to be operated from within Russia.

Furthermore, when the full-scale cyber-attack followed, a month later, it too preceded the military action, by a full 24 hours.

Experts agree that the attacks were both launched from Russia, but disagree over attribution of responsibility. Some blame 'hacktivists' - politically motivated Russian nationalists acting individually. But, according to

the security adviser and blogger at RBNExploit.com, Jart Armin, the attacks were far too sophisticated to be the work of amateurs.

"Kids don't take control of server chains across Eastern Europe. They don't set up copycat fake official sites. And amateur hacktivists don't or can't purchase and manage the swathes of Turkish server space that have been used for this attack," he told The First Post.

Armin believes the evidence points to the Russian Business Network. This shadowy, St Petersburg-based internet company is believed to provide secure hosting for much of the world's online crime, from illicit pornography to credit card fraud and phishing. It is also believed to control the world's biggest and most powerful 'botnet' - a network of infected zombie computers of a scale necessary to perform destructive cyber-terrorism or cyber-warfare on an entire state.

Links between the attacks and