The term “cyber warfare” conjures up images of coordinated military attacks mounted to cripple an enemy country’s vital infrastructure.
As the attacks on Georgian government and news Websites in the last few days show, however, the reality is much messier, and might not deserve the term “warfare” at all. It appears to represent an upwelling of antagonism on a broader front, coordinated across the internet to achieve maximum effect. Active government sponsorship is impossible to discern. All very Web 2.0, in fact.
Georgia was quick to accuse Russia of waging cyber warfare over the weekend after massive denial of service attacks against a number of official state Websites. But Jose Nazario, a senior researcher at Arbor Networks in Massachusetts who studied the pattern of attacks, told me his hunch is that this was the work of a loose alliance of hackers and other bad actors, not some sinister, centrally directed government plot.
Back-and-forth denial of service attacks like this (there have also been some in the last few days against Russian sites) have become part and parcel of many tense international situations, according to Nazario. Similar outbursts have occurred at times when China/US relations have been bad and are a frequent feature of Israeli/Palestinian tensions.
In the most celebrated case of “cyber warfare” to date, Estonian Websites came under massive attack in May 2007. In this article in Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Israeli computer security expert Gadi Evron detailed how these were really cyber riots, beginning with Russian bloggers boasting of small-scale assaults and followed by more widespread attacks by botnets.
In a blog post this week, Evron also says he doubts that what is happening in Georgia is cyber war:
Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically. … the nature of what’s going on isn’t clear, but until we are certain anything state-sponsored is happening on the Internet it is my official opinion this is not warfare, but just some unaffiliated attacks by Russian hackers and/or some rioting by enthusiastic Russian supporters.
If smart governments have always known how to use popular uprisings to their advantage, the Web 2.0 world offers many new possibilities.
