Russian Hackers Used US Identities in Cyber Attack on Georgia

A recent report from the United States Cyber Consequences Unit (USCCU) has claimed that last year's cyber assaults on Georgian websites were conducted by independent groups of civilian hackers having special relationship with the Russian government.

Out of those attacks, most of the distributed denial of service attacks that affected Georgian websites offline were targeted at social media and news sites which provided commentary and information on the conflict.

According to the report, Botnets were used in conducting these attacks, concealing the lines between civilian and military aggression. Botnet, as learnt, is a large network of hacked computers. Ordinary users may also become a part of that botnet unsuspectingly if their systems have been infected with a malicious code or malware that provides hackers remote access to their systems.

John Bumgarner, research director, Cyber Consequences Unit, stated that this is going to be a trend that will feature in future conflicts, reported Telegraph on August 18, 2009.

Apart from transforming common Microsoft Corp. software into a weapon of cyber attack, hackers joined forces on popular social networking sites based in the United States, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to target Georgian websites, discovered the US Cyber Consequences Unit.

Although the cyber assaults on Georgia were examined just after the last year's happenings, these US connections were not known previously.

Amit Yoran, former cybersecurity head at the Department of Homeland Security and current CEO of computer security firm NetWitness Corp, said that social networking, tailoring commercial software and identity theft are the most common means of cyber attack; however, their blend pushes attack to an entirely different level, reported Wall Street Journal on August 17, 2009.

Yoran claimed that each one of these things is not new in itself, though it combines all the attacks in such ways that have not been observed previously.

On the other hand, the Russian government has denied the claims that it had anything to do with the cyber attack on Georgia - a view promoted by the US Cyber Consequences Unit. Though, it said that the attacks seemed to be related to the Russian mafia.

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» SPAMfighter News - 9/7/2009