The FINANCIAL — “There were signs as well of a cyberwarfare campaign, as Georgian government Web sites were crashing intermittently during the day,” says New York Times. Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia have factually turned into a Ruso-Georgian war. The information war, however, has also reached a new level of escalation, says Deutsche Welle’s Ingo Mannteufel.
The front page of the website of Russian backed news agency, OSinform – osinform.ru – which is run by the breakaway region’s state radio and television station IR – retained the agency’s header and logo, but otherwize the entire page was featuring Alania TV’s website content, including its news and images. Alania TV is supported by the Georgian government, and targets audiences in the breakaway region.
Another website of the breakaway region’s radio and television station – osradio.ru – was also hacked.
Alania TV has denied any involvement, saying it was itself surprised to see its content on the rival news agency’s website.
“There were signs as well of a cyber-warfare campaign against Georgia, as Georgian government. Web sites were crashing intermittently Friday, reports Seattle Times, United States.
On August 8, the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia was accessed by hackers and Georgian President Michael Saakashvili’s portraits in Hitler look-alike was put on the front page.
On its side Georgia warns people not to believe in any information spread by Russian online, radio, TV or press sources, – as they’re mostly false.
South Ossetian officials stated that two Ossetian news media sites were hacked. Dmitry Medoyev, the South Ossetian secessionist envoy in Moscow, claimed that Georgia was trying to cover up reports of deaths.
As earlier, NY Times reported on July 24, government Web sites in two former Soviet republics, Lithuania and Georgia, came under cyber attacks over the weekend, according to Lithuanian officials and an Internet watchdog group. It was the second time in less than a month that Web sites in Lithuania had been targets. While the origins of the attacks were not known, both countries have had tense relations with Russia, and Russian hackers are believed to have been responsible for earlier, similar incidents. The Web site of the Lithuanian tax office was taken down after it was flooded with information requests, officials said. In Georgia, according to Shadowserver, an Internet watchdog group, hackers shut down the Web site of the president for more than 24 hours. The Georgian government would not confirm the cutoff.
On July 31, Washington Times reported that, the Web site of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia was brought down last week by hackers apparently based in Russia, the latest in a string of cyber-attacks suffered in neighboring countries experiencing friction with Moscow.
The attack was monitored by several U.S. Internet-watch operations, including the center run by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Computer Emergency Response Team (U.S.-CERT).
An official at U.S.-CERT, who was authorized to speak to the media but not to give his name, said the center was “not involved in any response,” but had passed information about the incident, called a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS), to DHS intelligence analysts.
The official said the attack did not look like a prelude to, or opening salvo in, any wider assault. “We don’t think it is part of anything larger,” he said.
DDOS attacks work by bombarding the server where the site is based with bogus messages and requests from networks of computers that, often unbeknownst to their owners, have been infected by malicious software and taken over by hackers.
Such bot-nets, short for robot-networks, can be rented from the hackers that run them, known as bot herders, and have been used before in cyber-war attacks like the one on Estonia last year.
The flood of messages makes the server unable to deal with legitimate Web traffic, so those trying to visit the site will experience abnormal delays and may not be able to reach it at all.
In Lithuania, 300 Web sites were defaced earlier this month after a law was promulgated banning the public display of Soviet-era symbols.
Estonian government Web sites were pounded by a massive series of DDOS attacks in April and May 2007, after a decision to move a monument honoring Soviet World War II soldiers. The attacks were believed to be part of a series of protests from Russia and ethnic Russians in Estonia.
Russia and Georgia have been feuding recently over Russia’s deployment in May of about 400 soldiers to Abkhazia, a separatist region in Georgia. Moscow supports the separatists, and officials in Georgia say Russia is attempting to annex the region.
by Kate Tabatadze
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