Evolution in Warfare
The Russian conflict with Georgia is highlighting the latest trend in warfare, and the geeks are a-twitter as computers take center stage:
The war between Georgia and Russia lasted just five days, as long as the new cease-fire holds. But cyber security experts will be picking through the ashes of the accompanying Internet battle for sometime to come.
Just as happened last year with the May 2007 cyber war between Russia and Estonia, Georgian web sites buckled under overwhelming waves of bogus traffic, sent from huge swarms of compromised computers. The attacks began as probes as early as July 20, according to Internet experts. As the war began on Friday, millions of extraneous requests — a so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack — took down Georgia’s banking and government sites.
“It’s just like Estonia,” said Graham Cluley, a security expert at Sophos who wrote a timeline for the cyber war on his blog. “In modern warfare, it’s not unusual to see opposing forces take over TV stations, radios and newspapers. In our century, taking over Internet sites is now part of the same kind of strategy.” Venture Beat
It would seem that these sort of attacks are now an early warning to what is to come, Chinese hackers have been probing the Pentagon’s netwrork from time to time, but it is comforting to know we have should have a few hours advance warning before they launch the bombs.
After the five-day Russia-Georgia war, a chronicle of the cyber battle unfolds
VentureBeat
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