BOSTON, Mass. — Georgia, Estonia, Radio Free Europe. The list of major recent international denial-of-service attacks speaks less to the potential future of cyber conflicts and more to the need of some nationalists to silence their critics, a network security specialist told attendees at the SOURCE Boston conference on Wednesday.

After analyzing the most recent international denial-of-service attacks, Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks, found that each incident targeted a government network or news agency that had criticized a particular nation, including Russia, China and Israel. While the attacks on Estonia disrupted online business services in that country, the attackers had primarily aimed at the attacks at government Web sites responsible for moving a statue of historical importance to Russian nationalists. And, while attacks on the former Soviet state of Georgia coincided with the movement of Russian ground forces, initial attacks that occurred more than a week earlier had taken down the Georgian president's Web site, Nazario said.

"In almost all of these cases, it's about censorship," he said. "The Internet has become a communications tool for dissidents, which is great, but DDoS tools are becoming a way to silence them."

A handful of times in the past two years, political tensions in former Soviet states have spilled over into cyberspace. In April 2007, protests in Estonia, which was occupied by the Soviet Union for nearly four decades, resulted in attacks by ethnic Russians and their sympathizers on Estonian government networks. A year later, cyber attacks on networks in the nation of Georgia accompanied the military conflict between that country's government and Russia. Radio Free Europe suffered an attack nearly a year ago after it posted a report on the anniversary of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

While several security experts reported an attack on the networks of another former Soviet state, Kyrgyzstan, Nazario stressed that he has yet to find any data that confirmed such an attack actually happened.

While it could have been an internal conflict between an opposition party and the ruling political party, "privately people are doubting that this attack occurred," he said.

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