14 DAY TRIAL // For the past few days, reports about the cyber attack on Georgia, which disrupted the government sites and other .ge domains, have flooded the news websites and blogs all over the world. New reactions emerged, as security researcher Gadi Evron thinks the attacks could be carried out by kids, while Google denies deleting maps of Georgia and its neighboring countries from Google Maps.
Given the latest armed conflict started in Georgia, everyone supposed the cyber attacks originated in Russia, though this has not been proven yet. Gadi Evron, founder of the Zero Day Emergency Response Team, thinks people are rushing with the accusations and believes that "this may end up being just some kids who got over-excited." What makes him take this into consideration is that the cyber attacks consist of DDoS on .ge websites performed with botnets, while the country's Internet infrastructure as a whole is not targeted.
Mr. Evron does not dispute the political nature of these attacks, but still feels that this looks more like the work of sympathizers rather than an official Russian attack. He notes that "while Georgia is obviously under DDoS attacks and it is political in nature, it doesn't so far seem different than any other online after-math by fans. Political tensions are always followed by online attacks by sympathizers."
Other reports suggest that Google removed the maps of Georgia and its neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan, from Google Maps. The Azerbaijan Press Agency announced that "the relevant maps went blank as soon as fighting broke out."
Google responded to these accusations through Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Earth and Google Maps, on their Lat Long Blog, announcing that the lack of cities and roads on the maps for these countries is not new and that they did not cover these countries because they were not satisfied with the quality of the map data they had available. Because of this, they decided to postpone adding anything as they believed getting better quality data was possible. Mr. Barth notes that other countries are not covered either. This is the case for states like Guyana, Suriname, North Korea and even more economically important ones like South Korea or Argentina.
This situation also caused a lot of feedback from users of Google Maps who, in majority, felt that they would rather have fewer details or poor quality data, than no data at all. "That certainly makes sense, and so we have started preparing data for the handful of countries that are still blank on Google Maps. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, as well as other significant regions of the world will benefit from this effort," commented Dave Barth regarding the user feedback.
He also pointed out that for the moment even if no data on these countries is available on Google Maps, the interested users can go to Google Earth where they can see a lot more details.