For over 24 hours the website of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia (www.president.gov.ge) has been rendered unavailable due to a multi-pronged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The site began coming under attack very early Saturday morning (Georgian time). Shadowserver has observed at least one web-based command and control (C&C) server taking aim at the website hitting it with a variety of simultaneous attacks. The C&C server has instructed its bots to attack the website with TCP, ICMP, and HTTP floods.

The server [62.168.168.9] which houses the website has been largely offline since the attack started. Passive DNS records show the system houses several other websites which are mostly unrelated to the Georgian government. However, the server does also host the Social Assistance and Employment State Agency website (www.saesa.gov.ge). This website along with the others on the host have been rendered inaccessible.

Is the attack political or perhaps nationalistic in nature? Your guess is as good as ours but it doesn't take much to come to this possible conclusion. Recent DDoS attacks against various other neighbors of Russia to include Estonia have been quite popular in the last few years. 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.

You can read the entire article at ShadowServer.