Did Russian cyber attacks precede military action?

Did Russian cyber attacks precede military action?

Submitted by stiennon on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 8:46am.

The RBNexploit blog states that the website president.gov.ge was underDDoS attack since Thursday. That site is now hosted out of Atlanta,Georgia (don't you love coincidence?) by Tulip Systems who isprominently displaying an AP story whcih says in part:"The original servers located in the country of Georgia were "floodedand blocked by Russians" over the weekend, Nino Doijashvili, chiefexecutive of Atlanta-based hosting company Tulip Systems Inc., said Monday.The Georgian-born Doijashvili happened to be on vacation in Georgiawhen fighting broke out on Friday. She cold-called the government tooffer her help and transferred president.gov.ge and rustavi2.com, theWeb site of a prominent Georgian TV station, to her company's serversSaturday.Speaking via cell phone from Georgia, Doijashvili said the attacks,traced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, are continuing on the U.S. servers.The president's site was intermittently available midday Monday.Route-tracing performed by the AP confirmed that the sites were hostedat Tulip."See that part about the attacks continuing after the web server wasmoved to Atlanta? Remember my warnings when this broke out? If youhappen to host your web applications on Tulip Systems' servers you maybe suffering from slow response times or even outages. Collateral damagefrom cyber war.Rusisan military surrogates in the form of the criminal Russian BusinessNetwork are engaged in attacks against servers on US soil. This pointshould be brought up as the Group of 8-1 discusses appropriate responsesto Russia's attack on Georgia.Ok, one more point. Thursday? The attacks on the President's web serverstarted *before* the action started in South Ossitia? Was this whole warpre-meditated on the part of Russia? Did they incite Georgia to takeaction against the separatists at a time that was oh so convenientlycoincident with the start of the Olympics in Beijing? I may be sufferingfrom time-zone confusion but when the dust settles Russia is going tohave some explaining to do.1. Was the war with Georgia orchestrated? (I know this is obvious, butdiplomacy seems so far removed from reality I think the point should bestressed.)2. How did the criminals at RBN know to launch attacks when they did?(In other words what is the real connection between RBN and Putin'smachine?)3. Russia has now launched cyber attacks against a web site physicallyhosted in the US. Is that an act of cyber war?While the press focuses on Medvedev's call for a "halt" to the war(which is oddly enough still continuing according to Georgia) attentionshould also be paid to the ongoing cyber war.