Four hours prior to this story, Russia launched a guided missle at the georgian capital. The tensions between Georgia and Russia have been palpable in the international landscape over the past 5 years- and although there have been skirmishes along the border- never have the two nations been so close to full scale war. Both sides have already shown a very large acceptance of cyber attacks, attacking each other’s websites as a show of force, a military tactic, or to achieve economic ramifications against the opposing side. A georgian-russian war, although terribly tragic, would offer the world the first glimpse of a full scale cyber war. If the two sides begin to actively target each other, they will most certainly use cyber tactics. But what images will we be seeing on the news if this happens? What form would these attacks take, and how would it affect the target nation?

Most likely the great number of attacks would be carried out against infrastructural networks. Attacks would strategically target critical targets, much in the same way an army would destroy AA outfits or border crossings- initial targets will include infiltrating DeMilitarized  Zones and destroying/bypassing firewalls.On the part of Russia, do not be surprised to see the digital equivalent of nuclear bombs being unleashed upon georgian infrastructure. The russian army certainly has centers where they have a number of “zombie” computers that are able to be controlled as a single entity. 25000 computers all flooding a server with requests will simply overwhelm the server, cutting off access. The more computers,the more bandwidth,the more organized a flood is- the more effective an attack will be. Also, russia also seems to have a number of very skilled hackers, who (In an attack situation) would be able to completely destroy a given network.

If a full-scale conflict breaks out between georgia and russia- Both nations will have to do an emergency inventory of their web-facing prescence, as well as internal networks. Any vulnerability that can be found, will be found.