Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
It was just too dang hot for them to see it coming.
A grey hat, in the hacking community, refers to a skilled hacker who sometimes acts legally, sometimes in good will, and sometimes not. They are a hybrid between white and black hat hackers. They usually do not hack for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may or may not occasionally commit crimes during the course of their technological exploits.
A black hat hacker would hack the firewall in order to get credit card numbers.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I don't see why not (if there was actually a declaration of war, which we will not get into).
But since we invaded them, I would say it is absolutely reasonable for them to block our sites from their citizens.
I don't know, dude. This is the Caucasus we're talking about. Lots of Caucasians there.
The opposite of progress is congress
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me for one country at war with another to stop information flowing in from the enemy to the local populace.
If one country (Georgia) moves their websites to some other country (the USA) and the aggressor (Russia) continues the cyber attack, is the aggressor committing an act of war against the "other country"?
If it isn't an act of war, what should the "other country" do about the attack on their infrastructure/website.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I've listened to NPR yesterday about this, and the best experts have been able to say so far is that it is cyber VANDALISM. No major infrastructure has been crashed. Hospitals and such have not been imploded.
There is even speculation that Georgians themselves crashed/trashed their OWN systems to exploit the current bad image Putin (yes, PUTIN is calling the shots, not Medvedev. Moreover, and ironically, a US-based outfit in, guess where... GEORGIA (yes, the state) offered and took on the hosting for the Georgian President's web site. Guess what? It wasn't working out. It was still being crashed/taken down. So, another party (seems to be Estonia) is helping out.
I really fracking wish some of these sensationalistic headers on Slash would get slashed.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/08/august_12th_show.html
Now, given that Putin/Medvedev claim Russian advances are immediately ceasing (purportedly) there really isn't "cyber warfare" going on, isn't there? If things continue, or escalate, THEN it might truly eclipse the bounds into "warfare".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Define "legally" in a war...
Seriously, black hat, white hat, grey hat or technicolor hat, it kinda loses meaning when legality itself isn't really applicable anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just put "192.168.1.5 www.somesite.com" in /etc/hosts, or whatever the Windows equivalent is.
It's actually /etc/hosts, believe it or not.
Well, or something like C:\Windows\System32\etc\hosts. But the format is identical, save for maybe using \r\n instead of \n (and I'm not even sure about that).
Must be all that BSD code in the Windows IP stack.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Actually it's Windows\System32\drivers\etc (the file is hosts without any extension). On Vista UAC may block your access to the file by default as well, the easiest way to get around this (aside from disabling UAC altogether) is to run your editor with elevated privileges.
...service denies you!
hmm...Russia....RED hat hackers?!? ehh? ehhh?? get it?!