Foreign Policy, posted August 2008
Shadowy hackers in Moscow and St. Petersburg? Old news. Get ready for the next generation of Russian cyberwarriors.

Much of the public argument for a harsh response among Russians rested on Kremlin-backed reports of extremely high casualties among South Ossetia’s soldiers and the civilian population, which Georgians fervently denied. This lack of clarity and factual evidence only ratcheted up the speculative nature of most discussions.

Those skeptical of the official statistics argued that the government could have fabricated the figures. In response, a group of Russian bloggers sent a public letter to SUP, ... They asked it to impose curbs on free speech and censor anyone seeking to undermine Russia’s war effort by expressing pro-Georgian sentiment. “Regular laws of peaceful times do not apply; we are at war!” read their somewhat hysterical letter. (Thankfully, SUP ignored their demands.)
It started as a fairly predictable digital conflict, mimicking the one in the real world and displaying no shortage of “conventional” cyberwarfare: Web pages were attacked, comments were erased, and photos were vandalized.

As Russian tanks lumbered southward over mountainous Ossetian terrain, Russian netizens were seeking to dominate the digital battlefield.

But sophomoric pranks and cyberattacks were only the first shots of a much wider online war in which Russian bloggers willingly enlisted as the Kremlin’s grass-roots army.

For Russian netizens, “unconventional” cyberwarfare—...

Managing information seemed all the more urgent as there were virtually no images from the first and the most controversial element in the whole war—the Georgian invasion of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia—and the destruction that, were one to believe the Kremlin’s account, followed shortly thereafter.
Much more at the link