For the first time in history, a cyberattack has coincided with a conventional military assault. Georgian government and media websites began crashing under the pressure of a concerted cyberassault a day before Russian tanks entered South Ossetia on August 8. According to U.S. Internet experts, the cyberattack actually began on July 20—almost three weeks before the Russian military invaded.

According to an August 12 Stratfor article,

The Georgian news website Civil.ge claims that it is “under permanent ddos attack,” referring to a distributed denial of service attack that attempts to overwhelm a server’s capacity. After assistance from Google and Estonian computer security experts, it is now being hosted temporarily on a Blogspot account. Meanwhile, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s August 11 interview with cnn was interrupted in what he claims was a targeted cyberattack. Many more claims have been made, and the groundwork now looks to have been laid well before August 7 (Saakashvili’s website, for example, was shut down by a July 20 ddos attack).Several computer security experts have claimed that many of these ddos attacks can be traced back to systems known or thought to have been used by a Russian hacker network and the Russian government in similar previous attacks. While Moscow has been particularly good about herding its domestic hackers as well as bringing its own resources to bear in these scenarios, however, the situation in Georgia and South Ossetia is just the sort of divisive event that attracts independent hackers to organize and stir up trouble on their own.

These attacks effectively compromised Georgia’s ability to communicate with its population and the rest of the world at a time when such communication was vital. While Moscow rejects Georgian claims that it was the force behind the cyberattacks, it is highly unlikely that the Kremlin did not have at least some part in orchestrating the cyberattacks that coincided so perfectly with its military invasion.

Cyberwarfare is emerging as a powerful tool that can be used to undermine an enemy’s communications systems even before conventional troops have entered the country.

This vulnerability to cyberassault reaches beyond small nations like Georgia. It reaches right into the heart of world superpowers like America. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote back in January 1995: “America is the greatest superpower this world has ever known. But we have a very vulnerable point in our military—our own Achilles heel. … Exploiting this vulnerable point may trigger the greatest shock in the history of warfare! … Computer dependence is the Western world’s Achilles heel, and within a few years this weakness could be tested to the full.”

For more information on America’s vulnerability to cyberattack, read “Target: America” by Philip Nice.