Russia-Georgia Battle Spills onto Internet

The idea of battle is now taking a two-field approach: the actual real-world combat and the secondary war being fought online.

Georgian government web sites are being hit hard as the country feuds with Russian forces on the ground. Hackers — believed to be Russian — are targeting government and military web sites with almost non-stop denial-of-service attacks. The presidential web site and other official national sites have been so overwhelmed with hacker-created traffic that they’ve suffered hours of downtime. One site saw a photo of a government leader replaced with images showing him as a Nazi.

Similar cyberbattles have been waged in the region before. Russian hackers were blamed for a series of attacks on Lithuanian government web sites last month. The attacks came during the same time various groups were protesting a Lithuanian law that made it illegal to show Soviet symbols.