We've seen the headlines before, most recently in the Russia/Estonia dispute which never escalated to armed conflict, but they're coming out again in the fighting between Russia and Georgia over the disputed South ossetia region.

Most people I know tend to roll their eyes at these reports and consider them fantastic and overblown, a case of doomsayers and reporters looking for something shocking cooking up a whole lot of something out of almost nothing. And it's true, the extent to which any of the articles covering the conflict from the electronic angle can exaggerate is pretty much limited to denial of service attacks and website defacements, which are nothing that your average day on the Internet doesn't include plenty of examples of as it is.

But information warfare (here is a balanced analysis of this in the current conflict by the Voice of America) has always been a component of armed conflict, and perhaps we should consider that what we are seeing, while it doesn't rise to the level of your average Hollywood techno-thriller, is in fact the face of cyberwar.

Why should your average CIO care about this? Precisely because it isn't a Hollywood thriller. A nation's susceptibility to website compromise and DDOS attacks doesn't lie within the government. When's the last time you paid your credit card bill, applied for a loan, or bought a new car from a .gov site? To the extent that the nation's business is conducted on the Internet, it's done on commercial websites, run by... well, by you.

While most of the attacks coming out of Russia seem to have been against predictable and juvenile targets like the Georgian president's website, a more worrisome trend has developed consisting of attacks against Georgian media outlets. This is consistent with the concept of information warfare; what is disturbing is that, unlike drawing a Hitler mustache on the president's picture, it also may be effective. Unlike Hollywood, the bad guys can't launch nuclear missiles from a compromised server. But they can limit, distort, or deny access to information. And information is the lifeblood of the modern economy.

In other words, while it may not be glamorous, cyber-warfare may be near, and it may be effective... and it may be waged on your enterprise networks, should such a conflict come to pass between your country and another entity.