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)."
After Google told them they were based in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'd cut access to any country I was preparing to wage war against... it's common sense to help stop communications to fifth columnists. Of course, they'll route around it. --Mike--
Times like these are when the red cross is most appreciated. They will likely soon be flying in C-130's full of porn and lol-cats jpegs. 'Round the clock flights will continue until the Georgian internet connections can be restored.
(additionally, the traceroutes could also fail because the routers and computers have been exploded by the russians with bombs from airplanes. this would be a worrying escalation of cyberwarfare).
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.
Everyone is making fun of the invasion of a democratic country?
Thats slashdot for ya i guess. Depends on which country does the invading.
"I have a bad feeling that this conflict is going to spread,"
You're young. People always get a little jittery when an invasion happens somewhere and they're not the ones behind it. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.
"catalyzing all the violence that has been the undercurrent of world politics in the past few years."
Except that, if you turn off the television from time to time, you'd see that things are still rather peaceful compared to recent history.
"A possible world war."
It's difficult to have a world war without two large international factions aligned against each other. It'd be difficult (to say the least) to determine common enemies in the smattering of brushfire regional wars we're seeing.
Heck, what we're seeing in Georgia right now stands out because it's just so damned old skool: using a fifth column to destabilize a neighbor to soften them up for some good ol' fashioned land-grabbing. You gotta give credit to Putin, he knows his stuff.
Time to root for the little country trying to get its own territory back under its own control.
Puting's claims of "genocide" are pathetic and would only work on the already brainwashed Russians themselves. Seeing these assholes trumpet their government's lies is just as scary as seeing Chinese bloggers' anti-Tibet postings.
They are trying to paint South Osetia as some sort of Kosovo, where the evil Georgians deserve to be punished the same way Serbians did. Except, unlike then, there is no genocide or "ethnic cleansing" (Saakashvili is much smart than that), and no country was giving Kosovars their citizenship left and right so as to be able to pretend, they are defending their own citizens. Lots and lots of South Osetian have gotten Russian citizenship in recent years — just for asking. Imagine, for just a second, America trying to annex Iraq this way — we would not even force Puerto Rico in!
If US is not careful, next year Russia will come up with a "good" claim to send tanks to Brighton Beach — plenty of Russian citizens there!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Gotta give credit to the Presidents of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. They may be small nations, but they talk like they've got a pair...
http://www.president.lt/en/news.full/9475 [Joint Press Release on the Lithuanian President's Webpage]
I know it's not so slashdotty, but it's relevant to the conflict in general and interesting nonetheless.
Good translation, and thanks for the twitters.
The person also mentions that protesters are out in Tbilisi, notwithstanding Russian bombing runs, that Russian hackers are attacking any news site that relates what is really going on in Georgia, that he has asked some hacker friends to attack CMI (rough translation of a Russian news site) and they have (seemingly) complied, that he hears rumblings - the light has been knocked out, as well as telephone towers and no TV exists now, and finally asks for humanity to help. He provides a link to bombed out suburbs, here: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44907000/jpg/_44907206_rubbleafp466.jpg.
It seems unlikely. The political landscape doesn't look like what it did pre-WWI europe. For one thing, there totally isn't the whole tanglement of alliances that escalated the conflict. I think such a war would be impossible for another fundamental reason. Communications technology has shrunk the world to the point where it is inconceivable to allow that sort of thing to happen. Instantaneous foreign criticism would likely stop the violence from escalating, and global organizations like the UN would attempt to stop the fight (UN =/= league of nations in terms of uselessness, before anyone says anything). Besides, there's no sign of foreign involvement as of now so it seems highly unlikely that this will be little more than a burp.
To understand how Russian "justice" works, read the shocking story published by "The Washington Post" (TWP). Natalia Trufanova was driving a Zhiguli (a lightweight Russian car) with her family in Moscow in September of 2007. She was minding her own business and dutifully obeying the traffic laws. Then, suddenly, a motorcade carrying Supreme Court President Vyacheslav Lebedev and coming from the opposite direction entered the wrong lane -- the lane in which Trufanova was driving. A vehicle in the motorcade smashed into the Zhiguli, killing Trufanova and her family. The Russian police wrote a false report, claiming that Trufanov drove into the wrong lane.
TWP notes, "When angry witnesses started posting video on the Web clearly showing that it was the motorcade that was driving in the wrong lane, the lead investigator looking into the accident said that he didn't have access to the Internet."
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.
...where astroturfing, sock-puppetry, slanted journalism and propaganda matters far more than the reality on the ground. Slashdot is a contested territory, and it looks like Georgia's propaganda troops have launched a first strike.
Not that I'm defending Russia here. The only reason Georgian astroturfers have overpowered the Russian ones on Slashdot is that the moronic Russian leadership, as usual, hasn't been investing enough resources in information warfare.
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)
The owners of the pipeline say it has not been bombed. See http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080809/world/georgia_sossetia_russia_unrest_oil_bp
The report about the pipeline attack is almost certainly Georgian propaganda (unless it's simply unsubstantiated rumors) - and it looks like the British journos fell for it. But hey, in this modern world of journalism 2.0, who cares about truth and fact-checking, as long as you can get the pageviews?
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -Sir Winston Churchill. http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Sir_Winston_Churchill/ Sure, democracy kinda works. But it wasn't democracy that gave us the constitution, which in my eyes, is so much more important than a "majority vote". democracy, as soon as it gets down to simplicities, is 51% oppressing 49%. just to put that in words: the majority fucks over any minority as they please. over here in Europe, we're not even so sure that our representatives are actually acting on behalf of the 51%. What say you, America? as soon as the majority can be coerced (I study advertising, it really isn't that difficult), we're back to who has the most money and who can throw the best parties, sucking up to those people who donate the most money. ya, this ain't news. but too many act like they don't know this. anyhow, my favourite quote of the parent's link: "It is proposed that government can be successful, and even vastly superior, if it has the direct participation of all of the governed. Open source governance incorporates the best features of direct democracy and tempers the drawbacks by use of a superior participation model and community structure." Are we talking about a Grassroots Democracy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots_democracy oh, I get it! it's a government that lets the populace take part in it's decisions! Kinda like how democracy is (supposed to be). Open source government is a government that listens to it's people.. in contrast to democracy (..?!) I'm not bashing you personally, parent, but democracy isn't the A & O it makes out to be. well, in soviet russia, I give you negative karma.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
Anyone who is surprised at this is probably unaware that disruption, denial and subversion of communications is a common factor in all modern (as in more modern than two groups of grunting and growling rock throwers) warfare. Telegraph and phone lines got cut. Radio got jammed. Alexander had fires built upwind of enemy columns to make it hard for them to see each other easily. The US Army confiscated the radio of the British ham operator on Grenada that was broadcasting a running commentary of infantry firing over the heads of the medical students being "rescued". The US news broadcast footage clearly showed them being forced to run under a line of firing (most likely blanks) M-16s; the early news shows broadcast the ham operator's reports along with the footage, but his reports were absent from the late news broadcasts.
Command and control (C2) refers to the ability of military commanders to carry out strategy and tactics. The addition of Communications (C3) refers to inclusion of the ability to carry out C2 without being present on the battlefield and the ability of units to coordinate over distance. That's the US version, the NATO version of C3 being "Consultation, Command and Control", just a different label for the same process. It's now frequently referred to as C4 because it includes computers. Since they are used for more than communication, the fourth C is not redundant. The other thing they're used for is data analysis for intelligence generation, so the "I" in "C4I" *is* redundant. And all the other extensions out to C4ISTAR is just showing off.
Being "cyber", it's pertinent to /. but it's not news unless one assumes that one particular form of communication should be immune to this "time honored tradition".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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
Big Mac Thesis: No two nations with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to War
It seems like this rule is going to be broken.
McDonalds Moscow vs MCDonalds Tbilisi
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.
The owner of the Twitter account is also publishing in English: http://twitter.com/wardirect_en
I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slaveship just goes in circles.