^[1]The New York Times ^[2] reports that long before there was any allegation that the Georgians had entered South Ossetia, the Russian cyberwar apparatus began their campaign against Tbilisi:

“Weeks before physical bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: win+love+in+Rusia.

Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded certain Georgian servers.”

And the war in the ether, the modern version of Churchill’s ‘Wizard War’ is unlikely to have stopped. Now that the kinetic battle has halted, it will probably intensify. Let’s discuss it.

Open thread.

1. What role did information warfare play in the Russia-Georgia war?
2. Were there any signs of info war preparation?
3. What were the major disinformation campaigns on each side?
4. Were attacks on the .ge domains effective? What were the lessons carried over from the previous cyberattack experience in the Baltics?