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American Spectator - In the spring of 2007, Russian computer experts hacked into Estonia’s government computer networks, blocked them from functioning, and brought the Estonian government to a standstill.
On August 8, 2008, Russian tanks invaded the disputed South Ossetia region between Russia and Georgia, a former Soviet satellite state. One day before the tanks rolled in, Russian cyber attacks defaced Georgian government websites and then made what are called “distributed denial of service” attacks, which effectively blocked the use of the computers by overwhelming the computer servers with a volume of traffic too great for them to handle and causing them to cease functioning. Russian cyberwarriors also managed to hack into Georgian servers to plant malicious software. “Malware,” as computer security experts call it, modifies a computer’s software to either prevent it from functioning or to revise its functions to benefit the attacker.
We don’t know of any other massive attacks such as the Russian strikes on Estonia and Georgia from unclassified sources. Several nations—China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among them—try to limit their citizens’ access to the Internet to prevent the spread of dissent. Myanmar (née Burma) has apparently cut off Internet access twice—once in late 2007 and again in November 2010—to place an electronic Iron Curtain around its population. More
