After the cyber attack, before the war

Georgia’s Vice Prime Minister, Giorgi Baramidze, and the former Director of Governmental Special Communications and Information Agency, Vasil Gogoladze, were in Singapore last week to talk about the 2008 cyber attacks that paved the way for war with Russia.
They both expressed a keener focus on how to define ‘war’ in the light of their experiences and whether a cyber attack should be classified as an act of war, given its debilitating effect on national infrastructure and stability.
Officially the war between Georgia and Russia began with a series of distributed denial of service attacks – commonly known in the IT security industry as DDoS attacks – that crippled not only the country’s infrastructure, but its judiciary and its entire government decision-making apparatus.
As a precursor to a war – a ground offensive by Russian forces - it was efficient.
Vice Prime Minister Giorgi Baramidze tells me: “The week before, as it appeared later, the conventional war had started – the presidential website was shut down and several days before the fighting started, we witnessed significant attacks against Georgia’s military and other systems, including media outlets.
“It was devised to isolate Georgia from the rest of the world, and it was significant for the Russian’s to gain the momentum to launch an attack.”
As we spoke Mayanmar suffered a similar co-ordinated attack. The DDoS that brought the country’s internet traffic to a halt three days prior to an election intensified between 10-15 gigabytes per second of bandwidth at the country’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication – the main portal for internet traffic in and out of the nation.
Much bigger threats have wreaked havoc on a global scale.The Stuxnet virus – dubbed the “first directed cyber weapon” has infected a high number of power plants, pipelines and factories. It could be used to control plant operations remotely.
From whichever way you approach the global problem of cyber security, the scale of the threats are growing disproportionally to policy frameworks devised to mitigate them.
As I’ve heard time and again, frameworks are required to manage cyber crime, but are there any noteworthy frameworks to mitigate cyber attacks?
In Asia there is not one over-arching cyber security model. NATO countries will convene next week when cyber security will be discussed, perhaps redressed as an act of warfare.
The EU, which has been exposed by cyber threats, recently ran its first ever pan-European cyber-attack simulation exercise, involving attempts by hackers to paralyse critical online services in several EU Member States, based on a scenario where internet connectivity between European countries would be gradually lost or significantly reduced in all participating countries.
The event was organised by EU Member States with support from the European Network Security Agency (ENISA) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC). More complex cyber security scenarios will ultimately be tested, going from European to global level.
Simulations and directives seem to be the way forward then.
Georgia’s response was to tighten up its own institutions and extend a hand to “partners” inside and outside of government.
“We immediately began to consult with our friends and created a taskforce to deal with these issues under a National Security Council,” Baramidze says.
“We have created units and procedures that will organise institutions to meet this challenge and we’re working to constantly to improve it.
“The system isn’t fixed, but it’s an ongoing process.”