Slashdot Mirror
Evidence of Russian Cyberwarfare Against Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "In what seems to be a repeat of what happened in July, a few news sites have mentioned that there is evidence of a campaign against Georgia. For example, both the government's and the president's sites are inaccessible, among other official websites. For some analysis, the RBN Exploit blog demonstrates various traceroutes that have failed to several sites. They also claim that the RBN (Russian Business Network cyber-crime organisation) are behind the attacks, and that 'Many of Georgia's internet servers were under external control from late Thursday,' before the actual war began. Finally, according to this Twitter account of someone in Georgia (written in Russian), he claims that 'Russia has blocked access to Georgian websites from within Russia' (rough translation)."
Georgia is a small republic with very little traffic to web resources under normal conditions. Now they are getting likely several orders of magnitude more traffic. And these are the consequences. But of course the "cyberwarfare" is much juicier piece for journalists to chew on.
"In what seems to be a repeat of what happened in July, a few news sites have mentioned that there is evidence of a campaign against Georgia."
A campaign against Georgia? You don't say! What tipped you off, the explosions? The Black Sea Fleet moving off the coast? The miles-long military convoys crossing into Georgian territory? The planes dropping bombs in populations centers?
Oh, the IP logs. Can't have a real war until Netcraft confirms it, I s'pose.
Actually, the closest thing to genocide in Kosovo occurred after NATO moved in and the Serbs were ethnically cleansed from most of it. What happened before that was actually very similar to what's happening in South Ossetia, a minority in a defined territory seeking independence and resorting to military means to achieve it with the help of a foreign power. Just replace Russia with USA and the parallels are very clear. As we now know, the atrocities of the Serbs in crushing that rebellion were much exaggerated by the western media and as the UN court recently acknowledged there was no genocide or ethnic cleansing involved. Actually the percentage of Albanians in Kosovo killed during all the years of Milosevic rule was smaller than the percentage of South Ossetians killed in just couple of days of Georgian attack.
Note: not saying that what happened in Kosovo was all right by any means, my point is that the parallels between the two situations are entirely justified and they expose hypocrisy by the west. There is hypocrisy in the Russian position as well but at least they pay a lip service to preservation of territorial integrity (as per international law) in both cases.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland -- where have I seen this list before?
Oh, that's right, it's the list of countries that had sucking up to US and taking political potshots at Russia as the cornerstone of their foreign policy since 1991. With such famous successes as celebrating Estonian Nazi volunteers (Estonia, obviously), providing torture camps for their new American friends (Poland), harassing Russians traveling between a small Russian exclave accessible only through their territory and the rest of Russia (Lithuania) and other similarly glorious achievements.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This may be hard for an American mind to grasp, but *there are no good guys here*.
Georgians are not good guys. Their goal is to militarily crush a national independence movement and to subjugate a people who hate the Georgians' guts. They've been planning this blitzkrieg operation for years (a nation doesn't increase its military spending by a factor of 30 if they aren't planning to invade somebody.) They cynically violated ceasefire terms, used massed artillery to bombard residential areas (killing ~1400 Ossetian civilians in one day), and were ethnically cleansing Ossetian villages. Now that their military effort has failed, they've launched a massive propaganda offensive to convince ignorant westerners that white is black and that a nation that launched an offensive war is somehow a victim.
But Russians ain't good guys either. Instead of trying to limit the killing, it looks like they are escalating the conflict by supporting the Abkhazians in Kodori. They are cynically using the excuse of protecting Ossetians from genocide to conduct a massive bombing campaign against Georgia's military infrastructure. And Russia has neither the desire nor the technological capability to limit collateral damage from its bombs.
What you are seeing is, essentially, a small bully being bullied by a bigger bully.
In 1991, when Georgia seceeded from the soviet union, a civil war followed in which these two provinces separated themselves from Georgia.
Historically, when a province or state seceeded from another country, there has rarely been unanimous agreement as to exactly where the new border should be. Take as an example a certain secession attempt in the western hemisphere in 1861.
Quite often the province borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines, sometimes they're even completely arbitrary. For example the borders between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia were the one time border between the Austrian and Turkish empires.
In the last two decades, a number of provinces have seceeded from larger eastern european countries, and every time the international community ("the west") was quick to recognize the independence, and the new borders exactly as the breakaway province claimed them, disregarding any claim by the other side as imperialism.
The war in Bosnia for example was a result, as a large chunk of the new country felt more Serbian than Bosnian, and attempted to break away from Bosnia by military means.
More such conflicts (and probably wars) are almost certain, as about 15 million Russians live in former Soviet republics (up to 30% of the population in some), many of whom presumably would prefer to be part of Russia.
The same situation took place in the countries of the present EU as nation states took form in the 19th century, which was followed by about 100 years of terrible wars, and ultimately settled by ethnic cleansing and assimilation politics on a massive scale. (15 million ethnic Germans were deported from central and eastern Europe after WW2, for example, forever ending any German territorial claims)
president.gov.ge took down it's MySQL database temporarily during the attack and changed it's front page during the downtime as an effort to reduce automated attacks upon it's initial page.
The National Bank of Georgia took down it's images temporarily when it was attacked producing text-only pages. It has since restored them.
There is no access to The Ministry of Foreign Affair's website, I have no inside information on what occurred but when the attacked start I do know they purposely turned off web services at some stage, whether or not they have restored them I do not know.
- Ð'ÐÐÑоÑ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine
Excerpt
Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way.
Anyone else seeing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as blank areas with no towns or roads in Google Maps? The change happened sometime in the last few hours.