15 August 2008

Cyber-attack in Georgia

Rob Stringer,

While war was breaking out over South Ossetia on 8 August, Georgia’s Government website fell victim to cyber-attack.

The broken links on the website prevented communication between the government and the people, and its timing seems far from coincidental. In fact the occurrence may have had precedence in a ‘practice run’ a month earlier when the website of President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (www.president.gov.ge) was "rendered unavailable due to a multi-pronged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack."

Experts believe that the attacks originated with ‘hacktivists’ who, amongst other things, added images that compared President Saakashvili to Hitler to the Georgian parliament’s site. However Jart Armin, security adviser and blogger at RBNExploit.com believed the attacks to be too sophisticated for amateurs.

"Kids don't take control of server chains across Eastern Europe. They don't set up copycat fake official sites. And amateur ‘hacktivists’ don't or can't purchase and manage the swathes of Turkish server space that have been used for this attack" Armin told news site, The First Post.

Elad Sharf, a security researcher at Websense, has commented on the attack in his blog. (http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/3158.aspx)

“In the labs, we have seen evidence of attacks that are typical of so-called cyber-warfare attacks,” recalls Sharf. “Certainly, DDoS attacks and defacements are not new and have been used by those with malicious intent during events such as public riots or events of a political nature.”

He notes that in 2007 “websites of the government in Estonia were targeted by a reported DDoS attack, and in 2008 a website belonging to the Tibetan government was injected with malicious source code”.

Sharf adds that he “wouldn't be surprised to see these trends continue in the near future”.

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