The report cites the work of Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks, in compiling research that implicates the Russian government in cyber attacks against Georgia just a few months ago. For example, most Georgian Internet traffic is routed through Turkey and Russia. As of Aug. 10, 2008, the day after the Russian Air Force was given the green light for air attacks, traffic routed through Turkey was almost completely blocked, and IP traffic through Russia "was slow and effectively unusable," according to the GTISC report.

Estonia faced .

We can expect such attacks to increase. Jon Ramsey, CTO for SecureWorks, says there are several reasons why: such attacks are inexpensive to mount compared with conventional warfighting; cyber defenses are weak or non-existent; the Internet offers "plausible deniability" for attackers; there are no "rules of engagement" to govern such cyber conflicts among nations.

VoIP and mobile devices

VoIP traffic, like e-mail, will be targeted for fraud, theft, and other scams. As wireless VoIP expands, denial of service becomes more than an inconvenience: in the case of service provider, an attacker could attempt to blackmail the provider with widespread voice disruption, according to Tom Cross, a researcher with the IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force team.