I Don’t Believe in Organized Cyberattack against Georgian Sites, I Do Believe in Russian Hackers

I’ve been thinking for a while if anyone will manage to bring the conflict between Russia and Georgia into technology field and I actually hoped that no one would since it is too complicated of a problem to be discussed by the technology blogosphere – after all, the only thing that actually matter is that citizens of Russia and Georgia (both military personnel and civilians) are killed in thousands at the region.

But it looks like these days it is impossible to have anything happening in real life without finding a way to connect it to the internet and how it affects this or that event. And what we see increasingly is internet growing to become an additional theatre of war.

So now we see the conflict heavily discussed in various technology publications because of Georgia accusing Russia of an organized cyberattack that caused outage of all official Georgian sites. A spokesperson of the Georgian embassy in the UK told to ZDNet that the websites of the Georgian government, including the sites of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs, and the official presidential website were all taken down over the weekend as a result of a coordinated DDoS attack.

In this very same talk the spokesperson admitted that Georgia could not prove Russia had been responsible for the attack because an investigation was needed to confirm it. But anyway the spokesperson used one argument as a proof: “Who else might it be though?”. True, the information is available that the attacks originated from servers based in Russia but accusing Russian authorities seems to be groundless only based on the facts that the servers were in Russia and Russia was the only party interested.

As a result of the attacks the Georgian government is working to redirect traffic from the attacked websites to other sites hosted in other countries or even on publicly available services, like Google’s Blogspot.

It is worth mentioning that Russian news agencies report similar DDoS attacks against Russian media outlets, including one major news agency, RIA Novosti. I guess that if we follow the same pattern of thinking, Russia should also accuse Georgia of an organized cyberattack against Russian sites delivering information in a way that is not what the Georgian government is willing its citizens to consume the news. I am not going to jump to conclusions here but it is hard to understand why Georgia is so very much willing to accuse Russia of a cyberattack, at the same time possibly engaging in the same activities.

But the main thing is that people don’t understand one thing: official Russian authorities hardly have anything to do with the attacks and will hardly bother to do something in this field with real troops in the region trying to restore peace. I don’t have any contacts in any of the institutions that could be involved but if there is one thing that I know for sure it is that all the Russian citizens are deeply infuriated by the situation in Ossetia and absolutely everyone here is ready to offer help in any way that we can to the refugees from the region. And I tend to believe that Russian hackers don’t need any special invitation or request from the government to influence the situation in the way that they can. Russian hackers are known to be willing to express their opinions on the most acute international problems in the way that is accessible to them. So accuse them of the attacks all you want but remember that they are not killing anyone.