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"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"

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Originally posted by Boogerhead:
Apparently everyone from Estonia to Google are pitching in to help Georgia.

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"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"

Cyberdefense advisors have been dispatched.

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Originally posted by Boogerhead:
Apparently everyone from Estonia to Google are pitching in to help Georgia.

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"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"

Cyberdefense advisors have been dispatched.

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Here's what's not known: whether these attacks were directed by the Russian military, as Georgia's Foreign Minister has speculated, by shadowy criminal gangs, or just by kids with a grudge against Georgia and too much free time.

The last of these scenarios is looking increasingly likely. [...]

Look too hard for shadowy political forces and esoteric technology and, he notes, "we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites.

What's frightening about the online attacks against Georgia is not that they're organized by shadowy Kremlin forces, but that they're coming from a loosely organized group of individuals.

It's easy to understand why the press and the military would misunderstand the situation in Georgia as a new type of military attack.

The truth may be more intriguing and frightening.

We've entered an era where individuals can organize their own "cyberwar" campaigns online, in concert with or in opposition to their governments.

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This September 11, everyone waited with baited breath for the yearly nyah nyah nyah; video rant from Al Qaeda.

More worrisome was that there might be a pep talk to coordinate a pre election attack in the US.

But something happened with the Alqaeda websites that usually deliver the videos: They went off line.

It was assumed that either the US military/security services took them offline, or maybe just a western cyberpunk who got mad decided to do a little work on his own. [...]

But the story gets stranger and stranger. Soon jihadi discussion group sites started getting hacked. Then other sites got hacked in return.

The 1000 year old Sunni/Shiite cyberbattle was on.

From the Washington Post.

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In September, hackers targeted what Iranian news media estimated to be 300 Shiite sites, many of them operated by Shiite religious leaders in Iran. Targets included the official site of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq. For several days, visitors to that site were connected instead to a YouTube video featuring American talk-show host Bill Maher mocking what he said were the cleric's edicts, or fatwas, on sexual matters.

In retaliation, Iranian hackers hit back

The two main Sunni radical propaganda sites, Al-Ekhlaas.net and Alhesbah.net, have been down most of the time since September 11.

According to StrategyPage... a lot of the hacking is not done by hard radicals but ordinary hacker geeks who got annoyed at each other.

Since it is more a low level geek war that has more to do with local religious rivalries than with real terrorism, the western cyberterror experts are sitting back and leaving the kids do their own thing.

Even in the Middle East, not everything is politics or religion. Some things are just done for the heck of it.

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WASHINGTON – The mighty U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons, midwived by World War II and nurtured by the Cold War, is declining in power and purpose while the military's competence in handling the world's most dangerous arms has eroded. At the same time, international efforts to contain the spread of such weapons look ineffective.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for one, wants the next president to think about what nuclear middle-age and decline means for national security.

Gates joins a growing debate about the reliability and future credibility of the American arsenal with his first extensive speech on nuclear arms Tuesday. The debate is attracting increasing attention inside the Pentagon even as the military is preoccupied with fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unconventional tools of war there include covert commandos, but not nuclear weapons.

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The Federation of American Scientists has posted a report conducted by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and delivered to the U.S. Army, outlining potential mobile device and service threats that terrorists may use to coordinate future attacks. Twitter, the social network and microblogging site, accounts for two pages in the report, and outlines potential ways terrorists might use Twitter to plan and execute attacks.

The report, which was originally brought to national attention by Noah Schatman of Wired, notes that Twitter has already been used in several instances to report on events that have happened before the mainstream news media picks up on them, and also events at the Republican National Convention earlier this year where protestors organized via Twitter. [...]

According to the report, "Twitter has also become a social activist tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences."

So, now atheist vegetarians are on the same watch list as potential terrorists?

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Originally posted by RUR:

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the Air Force's stated goal is to gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth

Ha. Easier said than done.