Of course the Klingons did it, or you were naive enough to even think for a second that Russians were behind it at the first place? Of the things I hate most, it's lowering down the quality of the discussion I hate the most. Even if you're excluding all the factual evidence (Coordinated Russia vs Georgia cyber attack in progress), common sense must prevail.Sometimes, the degree of incompetence can in fact be pretty entertaining, and greatly explains why certain countries are lacking behind others with years in their inability to understand the rules of information warfare, or the basic premise of unrestricted warfare, that there are no rules on how to achieve your objectives.
So who's behind the Georgia cyber attacks, encompassing of plain simple ping floods, web site defacements, to sustained DDoS attacks, which no matter the fact that Geogia has switched hosting location to the U.S remain ongoing? It's Russia's self-mobilizing cyber militia, the product of a collectivist society having the capacity to wage cyber wars and literally dictating the rhythm in this space. What is militia anyway :
"civilians trained as soldiers but not part of the regular army; the entire body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service; a military force composed of ordinary citizens to provide defense, emergency law enforcement, or paramilitary service, in times of emergency; without being paid a regular salary or committed to a fixed term of service; an army of trained civilians, which may be an official reserve army, called upon in time of need; the national police force of a country; the entire able-bodied population of a state; or a private force, not under government control; An army or paramilitary group comprised of citizens to serve in times of emergency"Next to the "blame the Russian Business Network for the lack of large scale implementation of DNSSEC" mentality, certain news articles also try to wrongly imply that there's no Russian connection in these attacks, and that the attacks are not "state-sponsored", making it look like that there should be a considerable amount of investment made into these attacks, and that the Russian government has the final word on whether or not its DDoS capabilities empowered citizens should launch any attacks or not. In reality, the only thing the Russian government was asking itself during these attacks was "why didn't they start the attacks earlier?!".
Thankfully, there are some visionary folks out there understanding the situation. Last year, I asked the following question - What is the most realistic scenario on what exactly happened in the recent DDoS attacks aimed at Estonia, from your point of view? and some of the possible answers still fully apply in this situation :
- It was a Russian government-sponsored hacktivism, or shall we say a government-tolerated one
- Too much media hype over a sustained ICMP flood, given the publicly obtained statistics of the network traffic
- Certain individuals of the collectivist Russian society, botnet masters for instance, were automatically recruited based on a nationalism sentiments so that they basically forwarded some of their bandwidth to key web servers
- In order to generate more noise, DIY DoS tools were distributed to the masses so that no one would ever know who's really behind the attacks
- Don't know who did it, but I can assure you my kid was playing !synflood at that time
- Offended by the not so well coordinated removal of the Soviet statue, Russian oligarchs felt the need to send back a signal but naturally lacking any DDoS capabilities, basically outsourced the DDoS attacks
- A foreign intelligence agency twisting the reality and engineering cyber warfare tensions did it, while taking advantage of the momentum and the overall public perception that noone else but the affected Russia could be behind the attacks
- I hate scenario building, reminds me of my academic years, however, yours are pretty good which doesn't necessarily mean I actually care who did it, and pssst - it's not cyberwar, as in cyberwar you have two parties with virtual engagement points, in this case it was bandwidth domination by whoever did it over the other. A virtual shock and awe
- I stopped following the news story by the time every reporter dubbed it the first cyber war, and started following it again when the word hacktivism started gaining popularity. So, hacktivists did it to virtually state their political preferences
Departamental cyber warfare would never reach the flexibity state of people's information warfare where everyone is a cyber warrior given he's empowered with access to the right tools at a particular moment in time.
Related posts:
People's Information Warfare Concept
Combating Unrestricted Warfare
The Cyber Storm II Cyber Exercise
Chinese Hacktivists Waging People's Information Warfare Against CNN
The DDoS Attacks Against CNN.com
China's Cyber Espionage Ambitions
North Korea's Cyber Warfare Unit 121
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