Russia and Georgia Engaged In a Cyberwar

doctorfaustus writes "I first picked this up in bits and pieces last week off Daily Rotation. A more in-depth story is available at ZDNet, which reports 'a week's worth of speculations around Russian Internet forums have finally materialized into a coordinated cyber attack against Georgia's Internet infrastructure. The attacks have already managed to compromise several government web sites, with continuing DDoS attacks against numerous other Georgian government sites, prompting the government to switch to hosting locations to the US, with Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs undertaking a desperate step in order to disseminate real-time information by moving to a Blogspot account.' There is a question whether the computer work is being done by the Russian military or others. ZDNet's story offers further analysis of the attacks themselves and their origins. Some pretty good reporting." And reader redbu11 contributes the news that Georgia seems to be censoring access to all Russian websites, as confirmed by a Georgian looking glass/nslookup tool. The access is blocked on DNS level (Italy censored the Pirate Bay in the same way). Here are a couple of screenshots (in a language other than English) as of Aug 12th 5:40 pm: www.linux.ru nslookup — FAIL, www.cnn.com nslookup — OK.

ComputerWorld guy CWmike adds "In an intriguing cyberalliance, two Estonian computer experts are heading to Georgia to keep the country's networks running amid an intense military confrontation with Russia. Poland has lent space on its president's Web page for Georgia to post updates on its ongoing conflict with Russia. Estonia is also now hosting Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site."

Comments

Re:Propaganda?

[gnick]

It seems to me that it depends on the situation. If the war's on our soil, blocking communication with the enemy seems fine. It also seems just fine to block our troops access to our enemies sites when they're on enemy soil. Also, if we're on their soil, blocking access to our sites seems fine. Basically, you want to interfere with orders being issued to a saboteur or similar and make sure that your citizens aren't subjected to foreign propaganda (only domestic propaganda).

Note that that's a very different thing than launching DDoS attacks on servers that blocks your enemies from accessing their own servers or communicating internally. That may be fine too depending on the situation. If you're disrupting military communications, that's probably OK. If you're blocking civilian access to sites advising them on emergency procedures or preventing them from accessing medical assistance, that's pretty shady.