Registan.net has posted up a nine-page executive summary of a long report compiled by John Bumgarner of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit. Steve LeVine at Oil and Glory talked with and analyzed the results... which show that complicity with the government in the cyber attack on Georgia was highly likely, and, in fact, it could have been much, much worse (just as the Russian air strikes purposely bombed all around the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline without hitting it to prove the point.
From Oil and Glory:
From Oil and Glory:
Yet, the cyber attackers did not go in for the kill, Bumgarner told me -- they didn't attempt to cripple sites that could have caused chaos or injury, such as those linked to power stations or oil-delivery facilities, but merely those that could trigger comparative "inconvenience." "There was a political decision not to attack those critical infrastructures directly. They made the point that they could launch these attacks. They showed they have the capability to do more," Bumgarner said. (...)
Indeed the cyber attack fit into an overall Russian strategy centered on Georgia's oil infrastructure, Bumgarner concludes. It succeeded, in Bumgarner's view. "Unstable ground conditions, augmented by cyber attacks, soon made all of the Georgian pipelines seem unreliable," he writes.
Certainly that was the impact for the first weeks and months -- Russia demonstrated that the pipeline was vulnerable, not to mention dispelling the illusion that Georgia enjoyed special Western protection.To a large degree, that remains the fact on the ground -- Georgia and the other former Soviet states of the Caucasus and Central Asia are far more deferential toward Russian wishes. Yet the oil and gas continues to flow.
All this Republics have their own presidents, own national flag, own parliaments, hymn and all other things that an independent state needs. These republics are not Russian linguistically, they have their own culture, traditions and religion.
Full independence for Russian colonies:
The Adygea Republic
The Tatarstan Republic
The Chechnya Republic
The Dagestan Republic
The North Ossetia
The Bashkortostan Republic
The Karelia Republic
The Altai Republic
The Kabardino-Balkaria
The Buryatia Republic
The Chuvash Rebublic
The Ingushetia Republic
The Kalmykia Republic
The Karachayevo-Circassian Republic
The Khakasia Republic
The Komi Republic
The Mari Republic
The Mordovian Republic
The Sakha Republic (Yakutia)
The Tyva Republic
The Udmurtia Republic
THEY DREAM ABOUT IT EVERY DAY.
It is only Putin's bloody regime, that does not tolerate freedom
of speech, makes them afraid to speak about this.
These republics are in fact independent, they are not
Russians and never want to be. Chechnya for example has
already issued a declaration of independence, that is one
step away recognition. How cynical can you be to demand
independence for regions in Georgia and not to allow this
for republics in Russia.