Registan.net has posted up a nine-page executive summary of a long report compiled by John Bumgarner of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit.  Steve LeVine at Oil and Glory talked with and analyzed the results…  which show that complicity with the government in the cyber attack on Georgia was highly likely, and, in fact, it could have been much, much worse (just as the Russian air strikes purposely bombed all around the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline without hitting it to prove the point.

From Oil and Glory:

Yet, the cyber attackers did not go in for the kill, Bumgarner told me
– they didn’t attempt to cripple sites that could have caused chaos or
injury, such as those linked to power stations or oil-delivery
facilities, but merely those that could trigger comparative
“inconvenience.” “There was a political decision not to attack those
critical infrastructures directly. They made the point that they could
launch these attacks. They showed they have the capability to do more,”
Bumgarner said. (…)

Indeed the cyber attack fit into an overall Russian strategy
centered on Georgia’s oil infrastructure, Bumgarner concludes. It
succeeded, in Bumgarner’s view. “Unstable ground conditions, augmented
by cyber attacks, soon made all of the Georgian pipelines seem
unreliable,” he writes.

Certainly that was the impact for the
first weeks and months — Russia demonstrated that the pipeline was
vulnerable, not to mention dispelling the illusion that Georgia enjoyed
special Western protection.

To a large degree, that remains
the fact on the ground — Georgia and the other former Soviet states of
the Caucasus and Central Asia are far more deferential toward Russian
wishes. Yet the oil and gas continues to flow.

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