no kidding about Georgia, US ... Georgian president's Web site moves to Atlanta

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Georgian president's Web site moves to Atlanta
By PETER SVENSSON AP Technology Writer
Article Last Updated: 08/11/2008 10:50:26 AM MDT


The Web site of the president of Georgia, the small nation that is battling Russian forces over a breakaway enclave, was moved to a U.S. hosting facility this weekend after allegedly being attacked by Russian hackers.

The original servers located in the country of Georgia were "flooded and blocked by Russians" over the weekend, Nino Doijashvili, chief executive of Atlanta-based hosting company Tulip Systems Inc., said Monday.

The Georgian-born Doijashvili happened to be on vacation in Georgia when fighting broke out on Friday. She cold-called the government to offer her help and transferred president.gov.ge and rustavi2.com, the Web site of a prominent Georgian TV station, to her company's servers Saturday.

Speaking via cell phone from Georgia, Doijashvili said the attacks, traced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, are continuing on the U.S. servers. The president's site was intermittently available midday Monday. Route-tracing performed by the AP confirmed that the sites were hosted at Tulip.

Steven Adair, one of the volunteers at the U.S.-based Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks Internet attacks, said they had noticed commands to attack Georgian sites over the weekend being issued to "botnets," or networks of computers that have been surreptitiously subverted by hackers. The computers are used to send bogus traffic to targeted sites, slowing them down or in some cases bringing them down.

The president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, lent space on his own English-language Web site to Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, after a request.

Kaczynski says in the note posted Monday that "the Russian Federation is blocking Georgian Internet portals."

Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., company that maps the pathways of the Internet, said the routes to Georgia showed intermittent problems over the weekend.

The country's Internet connections run over the neighboring countries of Turkey and Azerbaijan. The connection to Azerbaijan continues through Russia before connecting to the Internet at large, but Renesys saw "no apparent attempts to limit traffic via Russia," according to Earl Zmijewski, general manager of Renesys' Internet data division.

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Associated Press writer Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this story.