Russia attacked Georgia.
Though it did not exactly make the same kind of startling headlines material as the Coalition Forces in Iraq ( read: American invasion of Eye-rak ), it was indeed surprising. Anyway, my primary point of interest is not the war itself ( not much of a war, i must add) but the modus operandi.
According to one NYT Article ( link i am unable to find), the Georgia was under a cyber attack - an allout cyber attack against a nation. This is the first time that a war has been raged simultaneously - in both virtual and real worlds. Internet sources claim that the attacks on Georgia's internet infrastructure was staged and planned - starting as early as july 20th. Targets included government sites ( like President Mikheil Saakashvili's website, which was hacked and pictures comparing him to Hitler posted) which became victims to the now popular DOS and DDOS ( Denial of Service & Distributed Denial of Service): where the servers are bombared with millions of useless data and overloaded to shutdown.
Although the Russian Government claim that they have nothing to do with this - rumors generally point fingers to the RBN - the Russian Business Network, a St.Petersberg based gang known for such activites.
Whats interesting here is lets look at it from a different perspective. Lets say another country, a tech saavy nation, like Israel, India or Japan, was attacked by say the United States or the UK. The war would naturally take a two pronged approach - economic sanctions coupled with carpet bombs. thats the standard routine in modern warfare. But if the reverse were to happen? if Israel, india or japan wanted to wage a war against the USA or the UK, economic sanctions would be meaningless unless these countries provided something vital ( like back gold). An ideal approach would be to hack into their networks ( like the hollywood coined "Firesail" for Die Hard 4). with the internet not working, and the rest of the networks open to an attack - nations like UK, USA would cripple. utilities like power, banking, communications are inseparable coupled to the internet. The second wave of actual warefare can follow this.
Is this what Georgia was supposed to be? to see the impact of crippling a nation's internet services? for georgia, it did not amount to much, except for some lack of access to some government sites (Georgia ranks 74th out of 234 nations in terms of Internet addresses) . But for a nation more dependant on the Internet, it would indeed be a crippling blow.
A simple cost effective solution to wreck havoc.
Your thoughts?
Though it did not exactly make the same kind of startling headlines material as the Coalition Forces in Iraq ( read: American invasion of Eye-rak ), it was indeed surprising. Anyway, my primary point of interest is not the war itself ( not much of a war, i must add) but the modus operandi.
According to one NYT Article ( link i am unable to find), the Georgia was under a cyber attack - an allout cyber attack against a nation. This is the first time that a war has been raged simultaneously - in both virtual and real worlds. Internet sources claim that the attacks on Georgia's internet infrastructure was staged and planned - starting as early as july 20th. Targets included government sites ( like President Mikheil Saakashvili's website, which was hacked and pictures comparing him to Hitler posted) which became victims to the now popular DOS and DDOS ( Denial of Service & Distributed Denial of Service): where the servers are bombared with millions of useless data and overloaded to shutdown.
Although the Russian Government claim that they have nothing to do with this - rumors generally point fingers to the RBN - the Russian Business Network, a St.Petersberg based gang known for such activites.
Whats interesting here is lets look at it from a different perspective. Lets say another country, a tech saavy nation, like Israel, India or Japan, was attacked by say the United States or the UK. The war would naturally take a two pronged approach - economic sanctions coupled with carpet bombs. thats the standard routine in modern warfare. But if the reverse were to happen? if Israel, india or japan wanted to wage a war against the USA or the UK, economic sanctions would be meaningless unless these countries provided something vital ( like back gold). An ideal approach would be to hack into their networks ( like the hollywood coined "Firesail" for Die Hard 4). with the internet not working, and the rest of the networks open to an attack - nations like UK, USA would cripple. utilities like power, banking, communications are inseparable coupled to the internet. The second wave of actual warefare can follow this.
Is this what Georgia was supposed to be? to see the impact of crippling a nation's internet services? for georgia, it did not amount to much, except for some lack of access to some government sites (Georgia ranks 74th out of 234 nations in terms of Internet addresses) . But for a nation more dependant on the Internet, it would indeed be a crippling blow.
A simple cost effective solution to wreck havoc.
Your thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment