During the Russo-Georgian War, a series of cyberattacks swamped and disabled websites of numerous South Ossetian, Georgian, Russian and Azerbaijani organisations.
Alania TV, a Georgian government backed television station, rejected responsibility for the hacking of the competing news agency website.
Dmitry Medoyev, the South Ossetian envoy to Moscow, claimed that Georgia was attempting to suppress information on the casualties of the August 1-2 incident.
[12][8][15] On 11 August, Foreign Ministry of Georgia said that Russia was conducting cyber battle against Georgian government sites simultaneously with a military operation, while a speaker for the Kremlin responded than it was Russian media and organisations that were being attacked.
[12] The President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, criticized Russian obstruction of Georgian internet sites and proposed his website for spreading of the information.
[2] On 14 August 2008, The Washington Post reported that although a cease-fire was reached, communication infrastructure could not completely resume normal operation.
[2][8][9][12][23] RBN was considered to be one of leading cyber crime networks in the world, whose founder allegedly is related to an influential person in Russian politics.
[25] Don Jackson, an employee of Secureworks, observed that botnets were prepared to attack Georgia in advance before the war.
Furthermore, Jackson found that not all the computers that were assaulting Georgian websites were controlled by RBN servers, but also were using "Internet addresses belonging to state-owned telecommunications companies in Russia".
"[27] The ex-chief of Computer Emergency Response Team of Israel, Gadi Evron, believed the attacks on Georgian internet infrastructure resembled a cyber-rampage, rather than cyber-warfare.
The attack script against Georgia was discovered on almost every Russian news site by Gary Warner, an expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
[3] Bill Woodcock also said cyber attacks would stay around as a part of military campaigns in the future due to their low-cost.
[29] In March 2009, Greylogic researchers assumed that the attacks were possibly conducted by Russian GRU and the FSB, who used the Stopgeorgia.ru forum as a facade to cover up the state responsibility.
Bumgarner’s research concluded that "The first wave of cyber-attacks launched against Georgian media sites were in line with tactics used in military operations.