ACM TechNews

A New Breed of Hackers Tracks Online Acts of War

Washington Post (08/27/08) P. D1; Hart, Kim

Investigators at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab are monitoring the use of cyber attacks in international warfare. While many of the investigators joined the Citizen Lab to help residents in countries that censor online content, the evolving demands of the Internet have shifted their focus to cyber attacks, how traffic is routed through countries, where Web sites are blocked, and how Internet traffic patterns form. The Citizen Lab started as a collaborative effort with Harvard Law School and Cambridge and Oxford universities to track patterns of Internet censorship in countries that use filters. Citizen Lab researchers developed a software tool called Psiphon to help users bypass such Internet filters. However, over the past year the researchers have had to increase their efforts to gather evidence on Internet assaults, as online attacks are becoming increasingly important to military strategies and political struggles. Before Russia invaded Georgia in early August, the Citizen Lab noticed sporadic attacks aimed at several Georgian Web sites. Such attacks would be particularly effective against countries that rely on critical online activities such as online banking. After the ground war started, massive raids on Georgia's Internet infrastructure were deployed using techniques similar to those used by Russian criminal organizations, which was followed by attacks from individuals who found online instructions for launching their own attacks, crippling much of Georgia's communication systems. Weeks later, researchers are still trying to find the origin of the attacks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/08/26/AR2008082603128.html

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