Cyberwar in Georgia: Governments Are Not the Only Vulnerable Ones
There is mixed information on the state of the war in Georgia at this time. CNN is reporting attacks are continuing but the Russian President Dmitry Medvede has supposedly ordered and end to attacks. Cyberattacks have also been launched against Georgian government sites but Medvede may not be the one calling the shots on that front.
In a detailed description of the cyberattacks in Geogria, Dancho Danchev notes one element of the attack is to enlist average Internet users:
this is state of the art cyber warfare combining all the success factors for total outsourcing of the bandwidth capacity and legal responsibility to the average Internet user. Moreover, next to the do-it-yourself tools released, end users who are not so technologically sophisticated are given instructions on how to ping flood Georgian government web sites
Crowd sourcing works in our favor when we build Wikipedia but there is also this dark side.
Today it's Georgia that is the target but this is a much more generalized problem. We noted last year in this blog that all NATO member countries had already been the subject of some form of cyber-attack.
How long will it be before businesses become a target as well. Cyber attackers can rally their countrymen with nationalistic appeals but they could also rally would be script kiddies around appeals against globalization, corporate malfeasance or some other social issue.
Attacks on governments are in the news today but they are not the only ones vulnerable to such attacks.
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