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.
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.
I also am not surprised. Thousands of people have been killed in good old fashion bombings and shootings, why wouldn't they resort to other types of warfare and propaganda. I'm just surprised they're not doing more. I'm sure if Russia were inclined to, they could do more serious damage to Georgian communications infrastructure. In war, many of peoples rights are disrupted, including freedom of information.
"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.
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.
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)
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.
Umm...WRONG!
As someone who was born and raised in Armenia and often visits Google Maps to see if the map data or satellite imagery has been updated, I can definitively say that throughout the entire existence of Google Maps, all three Transcaucasian republics have always been blank with no road and city data.