Cyberattacks: The new battlefront

Barry sends in a very interesting article from the New York Times. The article documents a curious occurrences that took place several weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Georgia.

• Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.
• (Internet Experts at) Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.”
• Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

In the early '90, during the first Iraq invasion, the U.S. weakened their opponent with sustained barrages of bombs and missiles. Less than 2 decades later we are seeing clear evidence that the first steps in a sustained engagements contain bombs of a completely different caliber. Every bit as effective towards crippling the opponents ability to share and access data and disrupt communications, is the sustained attack on the internet infrastructure. This kind of attack becomes ever so much more insidious when you consider that projections have the U.S. military comprised of 20% of robotic armament in the coming decade. Disrupting the ability to communicate and control these weapons would be every bit as effective as bombing the individual units themselves with the added advantage of being faster and lest costly overall.

William Gibson and the other crafters of the Cyberpunk venue were pretty much dead on IMHO
The article is full of descriptions of not only ddos attacks but site defacement and other very inventive attacks.

<- more of the NY Times cyber attack on Georgia ->