Google serves as first line of defense during Russia’s invasion of Georgia (A plug for the cloud)

“Cloud Musings” Named A “Top 50 Blog”

By G C Network | August 27, 2010

My appreciation and thanks goes out to Jeremy Geelan for including “Cloud Musings” on his list of the Top 50 Cloud Computing Blogs. Thanks is also in order for “HighTechDad”…

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By G C Network | August 25, 2010

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By G C Network | August 14, 2010

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By G C Network | August 11, 2010

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By G C Network | July 31, 2010

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“Army Private Cloud” RFP Released

By G C Network | July 28, 2010

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Cloud Musings Direct Launches

By G C Network | July 15, 2010

In response to request, the inaugural “Cloud Musings Direct” newsletter was launched this week.  This bi-weekly electronic newsletter will highlight important government cloud computing industry trends and events.  If you…

CloudExpo Europe 2010: Not Your Father’s Prague

By G C Network | June 30, 2010

When my good friend Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe in Prague, Czech Republic my imagination went into overdrive.  Being a child of the 60’s and a…

NCOIC Plenary Highlights Collaboration and Interoperability

By G C Network | June 29, 2010

Last week in Brussels, Belgium, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium highlighted it’s support of collaboration and interoperability through an information exchange session with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and…

GovLoop “Member of the Week”

By G C Network | June 22, 2010

Thank you to Radiah Givens-Nunez and GovLoop for the honor of being their Member of the Week for June 21-25, 2010. Created in 2008, GovLoop is an online social network…

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “As Georgian troops retreated to defend their capital from Russian attack, the websites of their government, also under fire, retreated to Google. In an Internet first, Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reopened its site on Google’s free Blogger network and gave reporters a Gmail address to reach the National Security Council.”
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Now that the Russians are apparently pulling out of Georgia, the world is rushing to understand if we’re at the front end of a new Cold War. One of the things I focused on was the impact of this on the reality of cloud computing for the DoD.

According to the New York Times, “… the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.”

Weeks before the “kinetic attack”, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks reported “a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites…”. Other Internet technical experts cited this as the first known cyberattack that had coincided with a shooting war.

Assuming that this won’t be the last world conflict, this lesson may actually be a good thing for the future of cloud computing.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “The online attacks forced the website of the president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, to relocate to the United States at Tulip Systems Inc., an Atlanta-based Web-hosting company. Even there it was under continued attack, although it was reachable from a Boston-based computer as of Wednesday [August 13, 2008] afternoon.”

If the website was hosted in a globally distributed cloud, how could an adversary even target Georgian government sites with DDOS attack? Distributed defense in the public cloud may be the best thing for DoD.

A timely reference for this would be From Information operations to cyber warfare and a new terrain posted on Selil Blog.

You should also read Kevin Donovan’s take on this in his blog.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network