Cyber War, Defcon 5 for Georgia

In a previous post and in my lectures I define true cyber warfare as the use of network attacks to disable communication and other infrastructure preparatory to sending tanks across the border.  I used to joke that cyber warfare did not exist because there would have to be  neighboring states engaged in war that were also networked and I did not see any tanks rolling across the Canadian border with the US.  Ha.
So, the Estonian and Ukrainian attacks of last year, and the continuous Chinese attacks do not constitute cyber warfare. However the threat presented by these attacks was grave enough to be classified as Cyber Defcon 4.   

But on Friday Russia did indeed send tanks across the border into neighboring South Ossetia in conjunction with cyber attacks that have disable much of Georgia’s ability to present their side of what is going on. The cyber attacks are attributed to the Russian Business Network (RBN) which has strong ties to the Russian Mafia, and thus the Russian government. RBN is responsible for much of the world’s cyber woes.  

There is apparently only one blogger tracking the attacks against Georgia.  Thanks to the comments below for links to the RBNexploit blog.  My own traceroute confirms that the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site has DNS entries for a US hosting provider.  But the website, www.mfa.gov.ge ,is still not responding.  Anyone with more info please contact me!

Here is my previously published definition of DefCon 5:

Cyber DefCon 5. Nation to nation attacks that are malicious with intent to destroy communication infrastructure and disable business processes including financial markets.

Since Friday, Georgia has been in Cyber DefCon 5.

 UPDATE:  Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website is now hosted on Estonian assets. I love Estonia.

• Security
• cyber war defcon