On the night of August 8, 2008, Georgian troops started shelling Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, and then began their assault on the city. Within a few hours, Russia's armed forces entered Georgia, leading to a five-day war that cemented South Ossetia's secession. The conflict was fought not only on Georgian soil, but also in cyberspace, where Russian hacker groups hijacked the websites of Georgian news outlets and state agencies. This was the moment when Moscow first turned its attention to Russia's so-called “patriotic bloggers,” and started relying systematically on their services, which were provided both voluntarily and compulsorily. Meduza special correspondent Daniil Turovsky looks at the history of Russia's cyberwar with Georgia, and traces its links to the hacking of the Democratic Party in the United States and the arrest of several Russian Federal Security Service agents in 2016.
