Now, most recently its the Russian cyber assault on Kyrgyzstan, or as of 1993 – The Kyrgyz Republic, that passed virtually unnoticed in western media preceded by just weeks the Kyrgyzstan parliament’s decision this week to boot the United States from a vital air base at Manas.This has far reaching affect could create strategic chaos in the region for the United States. Especially now since the country has had it’s IT infrastructure attacked that temporarily devastated the country and put their military defense on full alert.
The assault was too similar to Russian cyber attacks on other neighbors, most recently Georgia which preceeded their military invasion, observers say. Galrahn at Information Dissemination says that “Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and pounded the Georgian military networks before the troop invasion.
Some say that the cyber attack on Kyrgyzstan was staged for sympathetic publicity and was NOT really conducted by outside influences.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), announced recently it considers cyber attacks to be the third greatest threat to the security of the United States. The only two preceding it are nuclear war and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This was recently stated by Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division. A cyber attack is typically inexpensive and can be easily developed in clandestine operations.
The Russian attack on Kyrgyzstan was a “distributed denial-of-service” assault where thousands, even millions, of computers from around the globe, controlled remotely and often without their owners’ knowledge, flood the victim nation’s servers.
The attacks on Kyrgyzstan were so potent that most net traffic in and out of the country was completely blocked during the first seven days. Cyber-security expert Don Jackson of Internet security firm SecureWorks as saying the denial-of-service attacks managed to shut down more than 80 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s bandwidth.
Another cyber weapon is to flood the internet with propaganda – the Israeli Defense Force recently paid a Texas company that specializes in search engine optimization to halt the online backlash generated by its military action in Gaza.
Some speculate the cyber attacks are designed to silence opponents of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who were demanding the leader reverse his plans to close an airbase to the US military in its war in Afghanistan.
The Botnets are used all the time they are the source of most spam and are nothing special for cyber crime. This was not the first time that a national government had seen foreign protesters attack servers and Web sites with botnets, hacks, and graffiti. China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and the United States have seen similar attacks, albeit on a smaller scale.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has released a mind-boggling expose of Russian cyber terrorism Nov 20th 2008 here.
View it outside of Canada here.
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