Walking Wounded by VanPutte Michael

Author:VanPutte, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10. Shadow Boxing

Si vis pacem, para bellum

“If you wish for peace, prepare for war.”

“In the near future many conflicts will not take place on the open field of battle, but rather on the Internet, fought with the aid of information solders, that is hackers. This means that a small force of hackers is stronger than the multi-thousand force of the current armed forces.”

- Nikolai Kuryanovich (1966- )

Russia State Duma Director and member of the Security Committee Deputy

In August 2008, war broke out between the nations of Georgia, Russia, and the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Georgian military rolled into South Ossetia, followed by the Russian military storming into the nation of Georgia. Georgia claimed it was responding to attacks on its peacekeepers and villages in South Ossetia, and Russia was moving non-peacekeeping military forces into their country. The Russian government claimed it was protecting Russians in South Ossetia. During the subsequent five days the Georgian military indiscriminately shelled regions of their country to force out the invaders, while Russian military jets dropped bombs on military and civilian targets. Hundreds died and thousands were injured.

Before, during, and after the conflict hackers also conducted attacks against the Georgian government and civilian infrastructures. Georgian officials alleged that weeks before the Russian invasion the Russian government released malware that infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. Russian hackers sent commands to these zombie computers directing them to flood Georgian government and news media with millions of useless messages, and redirecting legitimate request for information to bogus Internet sites outside Georgia. While no one was killed or injured as a result of these cyberattacks ‘experts’ noted the ‘cyberattacks’ complemented the physical invasion of the Russian Army by creating psychological effects against the civilian population, causing Georgian’s to doubt the validity of information that got through, and preventing those inside and outside of Georgia from understanding what was occurring within the Georgia borders. The Georgian government (creatively) remarked that the flood created “consequences similar in effect to a full-scale missile strike” and that this represented a “new phase in the history of warfare, being the first case in which a land invasion was coordinated with an online cyber offensive.”1 In the end, cyber experts proclaimed the Russian government supported the cyber operation, while the ‘evidence’ they presented could have been easily forged to deceive investigators.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.