August 17th, 2009
Russia cooperated with hackers in Georgian cyberattack
A report from the nonprofit US Cyber Consequences Unit confirms what only made sense about last year’s cyber attack on Georgia. It was carried about by independent groups with a special relationship to the Russian government. As InfoWeek relates, the report concludes:
“Many of the cyber attacks were so close in time to the corresponding military operations that there had to be close cooperation between people in the Russian military and the civilian cyber attackers,” the report overview states. “When the cyber attacks began, they did not involve any reconnaissance or mapping state, but jumped directly to the sort of packets that were best suited to jamming the Web sites under attack. This indicates that the necessary reconnaissance and the writing of the attack scripts had to have been done in advance.”
Even worse: the attacks are deployed over botnets created by taking over innocent users’ computers. In that case, research director John Bumgarner says, “Where are the battle lines in cyberspace? And who is the enemy?”
So, this is a trend the group expects to continue and expand. I would say it has been happening for a long time with attacks on US computers coming from Chinese computers but with no proof the Chinese government is actually involved.
“It will be a trend that will be in future conflicts,” Bumgarner says. “Civilians can become willing participants in fairly major cyber events and they can be anywhere in the world.”
