Several weeks before the armed attacks between Georgia and Russia, there have been a series of cyberspace attacks on Georgia. Apparently, starting with July 20, the country’s government Web sites received millions of requests, called distributed denial of service (DDOS) which managed to overload and temporary cause a general inoperability on the Georgian servers.

A report presented by Shadowserver, a volunteer group involved in tracking malicious network activity, showed that because of these DDOS attacks, the Web site of Mr. Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, was completely inaccessible for more than 24 hours.

Even though Shadowserver’s researchers claim to have identified the source of the attacks somewhere in the United States, there is still no certainty about the location and the attacker. The Georgian officials blame Russia for the attacks, hypothesis which could be considered rather probable by some, but the Russian government firmly stated that it was not involved in any way in the Internet incident.

Still, there are some supporting Georgia’s story: “The attackers are using the same tools and the same attack commands that have been used by the Russian Business Network (R.B.N.) and in some cases the attacks are being launched from computers they are known to control,” said Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks, a computer security firm based in Atlanta.

Fortunately, the attacks did not cause significant damage, as the country is still in development and its Internet dependence at this point is rather limited. The only real problem was related to the impossibility of spreading its messages and getting in touch with its worldwide sympathizers.