Slashdot as well as several sources are reporting that Russia has unleashed a full cyber attack using it's newly created, government sponsored compute cloud (botnet) on The Government of Georgia. What's more, word on the size of this botnet is supposedly no more then a 10,000 - 20,000 nodes. I'm also told this private "botnet" is composed primarily of AMD machines and utilizes a similar architecture to another military botnet reportedly built in a shady middle east country, which leads me to believe they maybe developed by the same unknown source. If this is true it's amazing that so few machines can have such dramatic results.
I received the following note from a few contacts last night and I have had confirmation from some eastern European programmers I know.
"Many of Georgia’s internet servers were under external control from late Thursday, Russia’s invasion of Georgia commenced on Friday. It is further requested of any blog reader the information below is further relayed to the International Press and Community to ensure awareness of this situation. Also as much of Georgia’s cyberspace is now under unauthorized external control the following official press statement is circulated without modification."
It seems Russia may becoming the arms dealer of choice for the creation of military botnets. This may be just one of many more attacks to come in this new world of Nework Centric Warfare. Maybe it's time for the UN to stop talking about Network centric peace keeping and start doing something about it. (United Nations Network Centric Operations, UNNCO)
More details:
http://rbnexploit.blogspot.com/2008/08/rbn-georgia-cyberwarfare.html
