Instead of Introduction or Let it be Intro: In the year of 2007, November, our University was hosting German Professor. I had an honor to attend the meeting together with the Rector of Tbilisi State University and give the guest brief talk and speedy walk through the busy halls full of students pretty overburdened with backbreaking books. It was me who nonverbally celebrated the happiness of delightful impression bestowal (our university-students’ willingness to aspire education) on the guest, who all of a sudden suspended marching and scattered his look over the Resource Center; for more clearance, I can confidently say that it is an ordinary auditorium with transparent windows and with a number of approximately 200 computers with internet access, on the left side of the Information Desk at the entrance of the University’s II building, belonging to the Law Faculty Sector. The German Professor, after ogling and blinking with fatigued eyes, probably tired of staring the same site with abundant number of students carefully glowering at the computer screen and pressingly tapping on the keyboard, turned to me and ceremoniously announced: “You are rich, very rich nation, dear!” I nodded in the utter confirmation though my personal presumption was not in compliance with his assessment about our nation. Probably my acquiescence was due to the fact that I saw emerging head from the remote corner of the corridor of the sightseeing guide and, in order to avoid losing him from the eyesight, I immediately headed to that direction. After my responsibility taking care of the guest was transferred to the Guide, peacefully, my mind automatically floated back to the sentence ‘sentencing’ that we are the rich nation and assumed from the five minute look on the Resource Center. My intolerable nature towards unanswered questions brought me to draw up several assumptions; the Resource center attracted the attention of the German Guest since a) there were considerable number of students being in the resource center while it was the morning lectures session still running; b) Georgia is a developing country and disregarding its financial difficulties government can still equip universities with such expensive technique. c) It was the only place in the ancient Georgian University where he felt modernizing power of the 21st century and its incentive to combine studying together with Internet Research, and relevantly, everything already seen seemed out-of-date in comparison with this place. However, none of my harbored thought seemed to be truly credible to me since they failed to be explanatory for the evaluation of the Georgians as the rich people!
***
A year later, in 2008 Georgia experienced sour adventure but the core concern of mine lies within the fact that it still continues its way blindfold. To note in connection herewith, I am apolitical, independent-thinking individual who recalls the following story to demonstrate how much further can the Internet negligence and illiteracy may lead. It was not only military armed conflict that Georgia loose with Russia, but in the long run it can be evaluated as the cyber war accompanied by military bombardment. The government websites have been hacked into, blocking visitors from accessing the sites. The Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was one of the first websites to be targeted using a suspected ‘denial of service’ attack, whereby websites were bombarded with millions of hits causing them to falter and crash. The Ministry of Defense and the central government site, together with some private commercial institutions web-sites remained down. The website of the National Bank of Georgia has also been compromised. According to the official sources, “malicious visits were outnumbering legitimate ones 5000 to 1”. “The Russian hackers launched waves of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the websites. This means that their computers and the computers of unsuspecting people whose home systems they have hacked and enlisted for their "botnet", or swarm of zombie computers, were directed to simultaneously flood a chosen site with thousands of visits in order to overload it and bring it offline. Tom Burling, from Tulip Systems, which began hosting the President's site on its servers in Atlanta after it was brought down by the hackers, said his company had become the latest target of a flood of bogus traffic sent from Russia to crash the sites.”
The Georgian conflict is now believed to have taken an electronic turn with official government web sites having been hacked and brought down according to McAfee. According to McAfee security analysts, cyber attacks are used as weapons together with physical attacks. More to the point, the pros of such kind of method is the fact that no one is directly physically hurt or killed and it is much harder to pinpoint the source and who is involved. It proves to be less expensive than full scale military attack still creating maximum levels of destruction. Since the internet plays an important role in the running of countries and can be detrimental to the country’s economy, with the severe impact on the running services ‘governments need to have in place strategies to prepare for this type of attack and to ensure that resources can be sustained at all times’.
Though there are marked similarities between this and the attacks on Estonia in 2007, I am not going to judge or analyze who did what. I put the special emphasis on ‘study on mistakes tactics’.
May be the opposing country is a way too powerful, but as the coin has two sides, let ourselves ponder about that may be it is we who were very weak at that stage!
It turned out that Georgia economized its revenue on heightening its Internet security level and this short-sighted policy proved to be twice as costly as supposed.
Though it was predicted that a rise in international cyber espionage would pose the single biggest threat to national security in 2008, Georgia did not take it seriously. Reports foresaw that governments and allied groups would use the Internet to launch cyber attacks targeting critical national infrastructure network systems such as electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks. In this case, we face the problem of ignorance of the nations, governmental institutions to whom the country’s external and internal security proves to be of utter importance.
I agree with Mr. Tan (The report on the third edition of McAfee's Virtual Criminology, published in November 2007), that “it is impossible to stop all cyber attacks, but with heightened network security — and a strong contingency plan — businesses and societies can minimize their impact and remain resilient in this new era of cyber risks and threats”.
While we revealed state’s irresponsible actions (particularly, Georgia’s) it’s time to move on separate individuals. As a standard practice, the conscious of Nation is appeased until the matter refers to them individually. There can hardly be found the nation in today’s world who believes that Internet is like water gushing from the tap called ‘Worldwide web’. This kind of distorted perception leads Georgian society to the dire consequences. The public awareness is at a low level, the digital life riding ‘freewill’ is longer guaranteeing the goodwill of those others involved. Putting the Facebook status on does bring a feeling of ‘social importance and satisfaction’, but one needs to think twice about the significance of its personal life details which goes downstream without the trace and you never know where it emerges.
Why human brains are so called “secure”? Sensory physiology defines that storage of information is the process we call memory. To evaluate, it is not the brain which is secure, it is memory within- genuine storehouse which is secure. So if willing to achieve security one needs to know inner state, superficial observation can be deceptive. On the surface everything can be smooth, when inside the system alarms to change.
As a result, in Georgia, the field of social media, digital life rides uncontrolled. Internet governance does not exist neither data privacy is guaranteed; we have developed so called “a Blame Culture” since the responsibility for cyber-bulling, posting defamatory statements, infringing upon the IP Rights lies on no one, but everyone. Relevantly, the legislation governing this field is weak, non-enforceable and overall, this field is full of mazes if it is not a real minefield.
To the chagrin of the community I belong to only a few is awake and feels like I feel right now – “a snail without a shell.” We do not have shell, shield when accessing web. No rights defended, no privacy guaranteed.
Continuing the so-called “ostrich tactics” of burying the head in the sand when in danger is the way to go, can and will be lethal for the upcoming future. What came to my mind now are the lyrics from the famous song “Is it yours? Is it mine? Is it ours? Sunset, sunrise.” Sunset or Sunrise can be mine, yours and ours but your life and digital life belongs to you, and only you!
***
It was a year after I submitted e-mail to the German Professor asking the question about his assessment a year ago (how ridiculous it is) and giving my own explanation for his announcement.
“Did you think that there was authorized software installed and secured driver downloaded in every single of them? “_I spurred.
“Of course I did.
Oh, was not it?”- was the answer after the slight hesitation.
If only it was even now!
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