AS THE violence unfolded between Russia and Georgia during the past week, hackers waged war on another front: the internet.
The Georgian government accused Russia of engaging in cyberwarfare by disabling many government web sites, making it difficult to inform citizens quickly of important updates.
Russia said it was not involved and that its own media and official websites had suffered similar attacks. Although a ceasefire has been ordered, major Georgian servers are still down, hindering communication in the country.
Some Georgian officials, bloggers and citizens were able to work around the disruptions, sending text messages to friends in other countries using web sites hosted by US servers that are less likely to fall victim to a cyberattack.
Concerted online attacks have been a threat for years. But security experts say the "cyberwar" between Russia and Georgia underscores the havoc that can spread on a digital battlefield. It also highlights how vulnerable web-reliant countries are to assaults that could cripple military communications or a national banking industry.
The attacks against Georgia's internet infrastructure began nearly two months before the first shots were fired, according to security researchers who track internet traffic. Such attacks, known as "denial of service" attacks, are triggered when computers in a network are simultaneously ordered to bombard a site with millions of requests, which overloads a server and causes it to shut down.
"In terms of the scope and international dimension of this attack, it's a landmark," said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which has nearly 100 researchers mapping web traffic through several countries, including Russia and Georgia. Cyberattacks can be launched cheaply and easily, with a few hundred computers and a couple of skilled hackers. Simpler tactics are even easier to mount by hacking into a server, deleting files and reconfiguring settings.
Compared with expensive military attacks, cyberwar tactics "seem like the kind of thing that a sophisticated military would want to experiment with", said Ben Edelman, assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
"Imagine how devastating it would be to a military commander to lose access to a server that tells him where his troops are stationed and where he has resources," he said. "This is the first time we've had such strong evidence of cyberwarfare."
In Georgia, the cyberattack mainly hindered the government's ability to communicate with its citizens and others during the fighting. The Georgian foreign ministry's website, for example, was disabled except for a collage that compared Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to Adolf Hitler.
To get around the blockade, Georgian officials relocated national websites to addresses hosted by Google's Blogspot, whose US servers are more immune to attack. Citizens used blogging platforms such as LiveJournal - the dominant platform in Russia and Georgia - to post their own reactions during the fighting. - ( LA Times-Washington Post service)