The last several years has shown that political tensions are usually followed by or preceded by cyber-attacks conducted by cyber criminals attacking targets which seem to be affiliated with the opposing side. Sometimes, it could be argued that such attacks were part of the governmental efforts in the political scene.

The political conflict between Georgia and Russia that manifested itself in a military ground operation, has been accompanied by cyber-attacks against Georgian government websites which took place over the past week. Georgia and security experts have accused Russian hackers of launching large and sustained distributed and almost non-stop denial-of-service attacks on Georgian websites, including those of government ministries and the president’s website. The level of endorsement that these attacks have received from the Russian government (if any) is unknown, as such attacks can be traced to their source (the commands to the botnets) but the issuer of the commands is anonymous.

A statement released, using a replacement website hosted at Blogspot, by the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has says: "A cyber warfare campaign by Russia is seriously disrupting many Georgian websites, including that of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."

The Georgian parliament website, parliament.ge, was defaced and images comparing the Georgian president to Adolf Hitler have been placed on its front page.

These coordinated cyber attacks have already inflicted downtime on several government websites, and DDoS attacks are still launched against numerous other Georgian government and commercial websites.

There have been claims that the RBN (Russian Business Network cyber-crime organization) are behind the attacks. Apparently, this is the first time the RBN target a nation-state instead of a business. Nevertheless, these claims track the attack to its source (the command center issuing the attack commands), but the identity of the party (political or criminal) that commissioned these attacks is still a mystery. We suspect that as political tensions are finding new ways to be resolved/expressed, the channel of using cyber-attacks instead of, in conjunction with, or preemptive of military operations would grow.