For over 24 hours the website of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, has been down as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This attack appears to have a political motivation, says Jose Nazario of Arbor Neworks. "Tensions between Russia and Georgia appear to be running high lately."

According to The Shadowserver Foundation, a security watchdog group, the site (www.president.gov.ge) began coming under attack very early Saturday morning (Georgian time). "Recent DDoS attacks against various other neighbors of Russia to include Estonia have been quite popular in the last few years," says Shadowserver. "We do not have any solid proof that the people behind this C&C server are Russian. However, the HTTP-based botnet C&C server is a MachBot controller, which is a tool that is frequently used by Russian bot herders. On top of that the domain involved with this C&C server has seemingly bogus registration information but does tie back to Russia."

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