Georgia hit by war hackers

As its conflict with Russia continues, Georgia's government and commercial websites have been hit by multiple cyberattacks.

Speaking via his website, researcher Jart Armin - who studies the cybercrime syndicate, Russian Business Network - claimed that government and commercial sites have been hit, and that other sites may have been hijacked.

He said government sites for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and President Mikhail Saakashvili have been blocked, or traffic trying to access those sites is being redirected to servers located in Russia and Turkey. The presidential and defense ministry sites were unavailable from the United States, though the foreign ministry's site remained online but without an update since Aug. 8 – when the Russians and Georgians first clashed.

Armin said anything appearing online may be false and warned users to “use caution with any websites that appear of a Georgia official source but are without any recent news as these may be fraudulent.”

Late on Saturday, Armin claimed that network administrators in Germany had been able to temporarily reroute some Georgian internet traffic directly to servers run by Deutsche Telekom, German's largest telecom, but within hours the traffic had again been diverted to Russian servers.

Researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation confirmed on Sunday that there had been attacks on .ge sites, and that parliament.ge and president.gov.ge were currently being flooded with HTTP requests.