There has been recent news coverage of the conflict between Russia-backed South Ossetia and the government of Georgia. No, the estate of Ray Charles is not involved with the Kremlin. We’re talking the Black Sea here, people.

As if getting your city shelled with mortars and being under sniper fire were not bad enough, in the 21st century Information Age there is also a digital front to the fighting. Wired reports on the digital assault taking place:

The websites of Georgia’s government have been under denial-of-service attacks for weeks, with Russian hackers fingered as the culprits. Those online assaults have only intensified in recent days, as a shooting war between the two countries has broken out.

Galrahn at Information Dissimenation says that “Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically.” The Washington Post adds that “the Caucasus Network Tbilisi — key Georgian commercial Internet servers — remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.”

IntelFusion calls it a “full scale cyberwar being conducted by Russia against Georgia.” As always, however, its extremely difficult to sort out which hacks are being done with government involvement, which are being done with government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government whatsoever.

Looks like warfare just went digital.

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