Security experts have cleared the Russian government of direct involvement in cyber attacks on Georgia.

Project Grey Goose, a volunteer effort by more than 100 security experts from tech giants like Microsoft and Oracle, as well as former members of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Lexis-Nexis, the Department of Homeland Security and defence contractor SAIC, said that while Russian officials did little to discourage the online assault, it seems that it did not order the attacks.

It looks as if the attacks were coordinated through a Russian online forum.  The forum was prepared with target lists and details about Georgian website vulnerabilities long before the two countries engaged in a brief but deadly ground, sea and air war.

Goose principal investigator Jeff Carr said the administrators of the hacker forum were keenly aware that American cyber sleuths were poking around and managed to shut them out. However, before the door was slammed, investigators unearthed a top-down hierarchy of expert hackers who doled out target lists of Georgian government websites to novices.

The Georgians blamed the Russian government, and Carr said that the level of advance preparation and reconnaissance suggests that Russian hackers were given information for the assault by officials within the Russian government and or military. But Grey Goose members could find no direct link between Russian government officials and the forum administrators. 

Russian politicians and military officials have previously endorsed coordinated cyber attacks against other nations as a show of nationalistic pride, and may have indirectly supported the attacks by giving the hackers intelligence. X
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