During the armed conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia, attacks were made principally against Georgian websites, but there were also attacks against Russian and Ossetian servers. Monitored closely as they were by system security experts, these attacks on occasion gave rise to some imaginative interpretations, as it is technically impossible to prove exactly who was to blame. Some observers expanded on unsubstantiated rumours circulating on the Internet with hasty comment on the situation but without bothering to check their sources. The wide spectrum of the information published about this conflict demonstrates how easy it is to be manipulated by people whose political interest is to exploit disinformation and propaganda.
The Georgia-Russia Conflict: Internet, the Other Battlefield
Warfare on the Web has the immense advantage of knowing no frontier, nor allowing responsibility to be clearly identified. Damage can be inflicted by an aggressor, or by the victim himself in order better to discredit his adversary. It is very risky to make allegations about the authors of the attacks in Georgian cyberspace without taking into account several other factors, the main one being an extreme sense of Russian patriotism. An attack on the mother country is considered to be an offence against every Russian citizen; there was no need to seek authority from the Kremlin for citizens to act on their own and take part in the conflict.
In November 1989 South Ossetia declared its autonomy from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. Since then the fledgling state has had a strained relationship with Georgia that finally degenerated into armed conflict. Georgia launched a military offensive during the night of Thursday 8 August 2008 against its breakaway region of South Ossetia in order to retake control. Most of the Ossetians having a Russian passport, Russia responded to this by sending in the tanks to defend those it considered as its own citizens. While Ossetian, Georgian and Russian troops were fighting on the ground, hostilities also broke out on the Net.
Chronology
The most common form of attack is distributed denial of service (DDoS): this allows the attacker to saturate and disable the opponent’s servers by flooding them with false requests generated by thousands of infected slave computers. The aim is to cripple the targets for periods which may vary from a few hours to several days. Servers which are configured to deal with a given number of simultaneous requests can no longer transmit answers if the volume of connections becomes excessive. It is very difficult, even impossible in certain cases, to defend against such an attack—hence its popularity. Multiple sources for the attacks also have the advantage of making it impossible to identify the real authors. This makes the technique a favourite weapon for computer ‘pirates’, who can hire a network of infected computers (called a ‘Botnet’) for a derisory cost of some tens of euros.
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