IT Attacks against Georgia?

There are rumors floating around that a coordinated attack is ongoing against Internet sites in Georgia. One can for example read about it in Swedish IDG here and here. There are also information about attacks in English news sites like Computerworld.

If we look more carefully on what can be called denial of service attacks, they can simply be just overloaded services due to the increased popularity during some events. How many journalists in the world did the last three days go to the website of the Georgian Parliament for the first time? My guess is that the last days events in Georgia have increased the popularity of websites in Georgia by a factor thousand. Do they have enough international bandwidth for this? Maybe, maybe not. It is at least unclear to me.

Because of this, as is explained by Renesys and Gadi Evron, hard to say whether we have a real coordinated attack or not. How much is just increased interest, how much are uncoordinated attacks, and what is the risk there is a coordinated attack?

What is important to remember is that regardless of why something falls off the net, it is today almost as bad for a country to loose its Government Website as having the national radio station being closed. Part of psychological warfare. Because of this, remedies against overloading a network or services must be deployed already when there are no problems. If there is a large increase in traffic, for whatever reasons, it is already too late to do something, if one want a website to be accessible at all times. And not only when the sun is shining.