It appears that Russian cyber warfare experts have been attacking Georgian citizens even while its official military are dropping bombs on them.

The Georgian government Web sites have been offline and others have been defaced.  After all, in the middle of a war it is totally demoralizing to the civilian population to be unable to find the right number to pay your car tax. The Web site for the office of Georgia Foreign Affairs (mfa.gov.ge) was hacked, and its homepage was replaced with images depicting Georgia's president as a Nazi. That site is currently offline.

More dangerous was the hack into the Caucasus Network Tbilisi, which is one of the key Georgian commercial Internet server. These have been slowed by junk Web traffic in a denial of service attack. The attacks are similar to an assault on the important Estonian government Web sites in April 2007, when Russian hackers complained about removal of a Soviet World War II memorial.