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Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a defense researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of goods directed at Georgian government sites with the letter: “win+love+in+Rusia.”

Other Net specialists in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Net infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple DDOS attacks. They said the command and control server that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.

As it turns out, the July attack

may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started within Georgia and Russia. According to Web technical experts, it was the first instance a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.

precisely who was behind the cyberattack is not known. The Georgian government blamed Russia for the attacks, but the Russian government said it was not involved.

In the end, Georgia, with a population of 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the World Wide Web, saw little effect beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government’s ability to spread its letter online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.

It ranks 74th out of 234 nations in terms of Net addresses, behind Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia and El Salvador. Cyberattacks have far less impact on such a country than they might on a more Internet-dependent…

Original post by dhiram