Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [14]
Tsyganok’s depiction of events manages to underscore the Russian government’s practice of distancing itself from the nationalistic hacker community, thus gaining deniability while passively supporting and enjoying the strategic benefits of their actions.
The Foundation for Effective Politics’ War on the Net (Day One)
Pravada.ru printed an article by Maksim Zharov of the Foundation for Effective Politics (FEP) entitled “Russia Versus Georgia: War on the Net—Day One” on August 9, 2008. Zharov is also one of the authors of the book Chronicles of Information Warfare and used to work for Nikita Ivanov, then deputy chief of the Administration for Interregional and Cultural Ties With Foreign Countries of the President’s Staff and supervisor of the pro-Kremlin youth movements (i.e., Nashi). (Zharov earlier published (through Yevropa) an instruction manual for bloggers who want to “fight the enemies of Russia” in the blogosphere.)
The Foundation for Effective Politics is a Kremlin-friendly organization created by Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the earliest adopters of the Russian Internet for state propaganda purposes. You can read more on Pavlovsky and the FEP in Chapter 11.
Zharov comments on the use of the Russian youth movements to wage warfare on the Net. This was repeated by the administrator of the StopGeorgia.ru forum in the following announcement to its membership on August 9, 2008, at 3:08 p.m.:
Let me remind you that on August 8, leaders of several Russian youth movements have signed the statement which calls for supporters to wage information war against the President of Georgia Michael Saakashvili on all Internet resources.
Zharov elaborates on this fact by referring to an event in the city of Krasnoyarsk where a joint statement by the leaders of Russian youth movements announced:
We declare information war on the Saakashvili regime. The Internet should oppose American-Georgian propaganda which is based on double standards.
He names Nashi as one such organization whose leaders have close ties with the Kremlin and whose members have been involved in these Internet wars, both in Estonia and Georgia.
Internet warfare, according to Zharov, was started by Georgian hackers attacking South Ossettian websites on August 7, one day before the Russian invasion.
The South Ossetian site http://cominf.org reported in the afternoon of August 7 that because of a DDoS attack, the Ossetian sites were often inaccessible for long periods. In order to relieve them, an additional site, tskhinval.ru, had to be set up. In addition, a fake site of the Osinform news agency, http://www.os-inform.com, created by Georgia, appeared.
Zharov’s personal preference for information about the Georgian war was LiveJournal, known in Russian as ZhZh (Zhivoy Zhurnal), particularly the georgia_war community. It contained, in Zharov’s words, “a fairly objective indicator of the state of affairs on the Internet front, in which the most diverse opinions are published.”
One of the more interesting things that Zharov wrote in “Russia Versus Georgia: War on the Net. Day Three,” published in Moscow Pravda.ru in Russian August 11, 2008, was his conjecture about which nation had the capability to launch a DDoS attack of the size seen during the five-day war:
In general, many people are forming the impression that these attacks are certainly not the work of Georgian hackers.
And to be honest, I do not believe that the Russian military have a special service that swamped all of the Georgian websites even more quickly on the very day of the unexpected attacks by the Georgians.
However, in the United States, such sub-units of cyber troops were created many years ago (emphasis added).
So Zharov acknowledges their involvement in organizing an “information war” against Georgia, but he completely ignores their involvement in the cyber war, and he instead speculates that the only military force that has the capability of