Georgia is not only under physical assault from Russia, resulting in the death of thousands of its citizens, but its websites are under attack as well. Welcome to the future: cyberwar. 

From Wired: The websites of Georgia's government have been under denial-of-service attacks for weeks, with Russian hackers fingered as the culprits. Those online assaults have only intensified in recent days, as a shooting war between the two countries has broken out.

Galrahn at Information Dissimenation says that "Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically." The Washington Post adds that "the Caucasus Network Tbilisi -- key Georgian commercial Internet servers -- remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors."

IntelFusion calls it a "full scale cyberwarbeing conducted by Russia against Georgia." As always, however, it is extremely difficult to sort out which hacks are being done with Russian government involvement, which are being done with government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government whatsoever.

While the governmentof the United States can’t seem to find a way to help Georgia, a nation we have encouraged to get as close to the West as possible, even supporting, at least verbally, its desire to join NATO, Google has managed to offer more concrete assistance. The company has allowed the Georgian news site, Civil.ge, immobilized by the Russian attack, to move its operations to its one of Google’s Blogspot domains. Google’s superior infrastructure is believed to be a tough target for the Russian hackers.

In addition, Estonia,which is as technologically advanced and as dependent upon its cyber connections and abilities as any nation in the world, and which suffered its own attacks from an angry Russia, is now hosting Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Estonia has also dispatched cyberdefense advisors to Georgia.

And the cyberwar is spreading. Azerbaijan has reported that two of its media outlets are under attack, and some Russian sites are getting hit in return.

Bullets and bombs are anold story, and we all know the horrors they inflict. Cyberwar is still in its infancy, and its destructive power has yet to be fully flexed or felt. Shutting down a news site is one thing, and disrupting air traffic signals or turning off a city’s electric grid or diverting a country’s water system is quite another. But that day is coming, and we can only guess at the consequences.