Ride the Lightning

CYBERWARFARE – GEORGIA ON MY MIND

August 20, 2008

Does anyone seriously think that any country would go to war today and not include cyberwarfare as part of its attack strategy? And yet the newspapers and blogs have been full of researchers/pundits suggesting that the attacks on ill-secured Georgian sites were little more than the work of over-excited Russian kids. So what kind of Kool Aid have these guys been drinking?

War without cyberwar? Unthinkable – today.

The sad thing is that what electronic evidence we have doesn’t tell us much about the underlying source of the attacks, nor is it likely to. The Russian government, hardly a paradigm of moral conduct, would not likely miss out on a chance to conduct cyberwarfare while attacking Georgia, though it has done a good job of scrubbing its footprints.

The Wall Street Journal pointed at least one finger at the Russian Business Network, which is known to act as a carrier for online criminal activities. I agree with those security experts who have concluded that the Russian government is in bed with the criminal elements (assuming they are not one and the same thing) to give itself plausible deniability. Give the criminals an IOU, take a pass on some prosecutions, funnel a little money here and there, dole out a little protection, etc. etc. A useful quid pro quo.

And the response? Computer Emergency Response Teams have been sent in from other countries to aid Georgia in fighting the Distributed Denial of Service and other cyberattacks. Apparently, allies still “send in the troops”, but now they send in “cyberwarriors.”

Unimaginable just a couple of decades ago, cyberwarfare is here to stay and represents one of the greatest challenges for all governments. I hope the U.S. government is watching what has happened in Georgia and is taking notes. I have very little faith that we are well prepared for a true cyberwar.

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