Starting last Saturday, and appearing to have ended recently, the President of Georgia's governmental website has been hit hard by sustained distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The unwanted network activity has come from one (or more) big botnets directed by a HTTP based command and control server based in US. This server used a bot-herding tool called MachBot, to flood www.president.gov.ge with HTTP, ICMP and TCP DDoS attacks. The website, inundated with connection requests, was shutdown for a period of time, but is now back online. Apparently the host site for the C&C server began blocked its network access. Security specialists from the Shadowserver Foundation suppose that the C&C server has only been up for a few weeks, and has only ever been used in this DDoS campaign.   

There is no hard evidence that the instigators behind these attacks were affiliated with the Russian government. Quite possibly, the attackers could have been politically motivated (and bored) teenagers. However this recent attack follows in the footsteps of similar DDoS campaigns that took place against a number of Lithuanian sites last month, not to mention the Great Estonia Cyber-War of 2007, and before that, the attacks against the democracy-leaning Ukrainian government (led by the dioxin-poisoned President Viktor Yuschenko), which has endeavored to gain favor with the NATO states.