In a sign of the times, it appears that the Internet has arrived as a weapon. For all of you who have been victimized by spam attacks, this may not be news to you. But the New York Times is reporting today that cyber attacks preceded Russia’s invasion.

Those in the know have been predicting this kind of use of the Internet, computers and servers for some time. And the U.S. is considering a Cyber Command to launch and guard against such attacks. And New Mexico is in the hunt to land the operation.

The Times reports:
 

Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.”

 

Other Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple D.D.O.S. attacks. They said the command and control server that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.