Ketevan Chincharadze
In August 2008, as Russian tanks rolled into Georgia’s Tskhinvali Region, not self-proclaimed South Ossetia, Georgian government websites were under cyber siege. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, defaced portals, and data theft disrupted communications as Georgian officials tried to urgently reach Western leaders, some on vacation, others attending the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.
For the first time in history, a state had unleashed coordinated cyberattacks along with military operations. In post-Soviet, developing Georgia, with limited digital infrastructure and nascent social media, the attacks received little public attention and had minimal impact on combat operations. Seventeen years later, however, technological advancement and growing digital dependency have dramatically amplified the scale of cyber threats. The ongoing war in Ukraine illustrates this trend.
In the weeks leading up to the Russo-Georgian War, Russian hackers attacked Georgia’s digital ecosystem to sow chaos within the Georgian government and society as Russian troops were amassing along the northern border. This marked the dawn of modern hybrid or gray zone warfare, which blends conventional military force with unconventional tactics, such as cyberattacks.
In July 2008, millions of DDoS requests overwhelmed Georgian websites in an attempt to disable both government and civilian servers. Close to the invasion, hackers began using techniques such as SQL injections, a more advanced assault, which enables attackers to bypass website protections and directly penetrate servers with malicious queries. Numerous websites were defaced, and some even used photo manipulations to compare Georgia’s then president Mikheil Saakashvili to Adolf Hitler.
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