Georgian Web Sites Under Attack

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/08/georgian_web_sites_under_attac.html?nav=rss_blog
by: Brian Krebs

As Russian bombs rained down on towns in separatist towns of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, hackers mounted a digital assault on the nation's top Web properties this week, knocking government Web sites offline and defacing others.

According to reports from security experts who have been monitoring the ongoing cyber attacks, the Web site for the office of Georgia Foreign Affairs (mfa.gov.ge) was hacked, and its homepage was replaced with images depicting Georgia's president as a Nazi. That site is currently offline.

Other Georgian Web properties, such as the Caucasus Network Tbilisi -- key Georgian commercial Internet servers -- remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.

Security Blogger Jart Armin has been tracking the attacks by conducting Internet traces and lookups at key Georgian Web properties.

The apparently coordinated cyber attacks are reminiscent of recent cyber wars waged against other former Soviet republics that have attracted the ire of the Russian government for various political reasons. Last month, a similar assault targeted important Lithuanian government Web sites. In April 2007, the ultra-wired country suffered major disruptions in much of its information infrastructure, thanks largely to Russian hackers who were upset over the removal of a Soviet World War II memorial from the center of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.