[ISN] Kyrgyzstan on verge of cyber war

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/06/17/10020320.html

By Marina Volkova
The Voice of Russia
Jun 17, 2010 

The escalating ethnic conflict in Kyrgyzstan has already given rise to 
cyber attacks carried out on government and media websites. Russian 
cyber security experts refer to them as means of information warfare.

Cyber attacks, sometimes known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 
attacks, involve breaking into millions of computers to forward requests 
to all servers within the .kg domain zone, bringing them down. Users 
cannot therefore get access to official information, said Roman 
Romachev, the Director General of the R-Techno agency of business 
intelligence. Hackers launch attacks from computers all over the 
Internet, making the tracing of these requests absolutely impossible, he 
said.

As part of the cyber war, DDoS attacks block all your opponent.s 
information. Frequently used during election campaigns and costing only 
one hundred dollars, these attacks may deactivate numerous web sites, 
Roman Romachev says.

The information war has not yet started in full force and effect in 
Kyrgyzstan, according to Russian IT-analyst Andrei Masalovich of 
DialogueScience Inc. He believes cyber attacks could be launched on 
every country which will send its troops to Kyrgyzstan to help resolve 
the ethnic conflict. Russia should not therefore intervene in the 
current situation, the businessman said.

Further aggravation of the ongoing conflict will result in a full-scale 
information war. Those who will bring armed forces to the republic, will 
be definitely exposed to massive cyber attacks.

Battles in cyberspace are an integral part of armed conflicts, like for 
instance, the Georgian aggression against South Ossetia in 2008. Tbilisi 
then unleashed another kind of war, blocking the country.s entire web 
segment, so that the world could not find out the truth about the 
origins of the conflict.


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