As Georgia’s geographic boundaries were being crossed by Russian forces, many of Georgia’s official Web sites were attacked. The Georgian National Bank and President Mikhail Saakashvili’s sites were disabled, and the foreign ministry’s homepage was defaced with photos of the president next to Adolph Hitler.

When Georgia accused Russian bloggers of being behind the attacks, Estonia, which suffered its own cyberattacks during a 2007 dispute with Russia, offered some of its expertise to help out. In the meantime, some Russian media outlets and separatist Web sites in South Ossetia also reported cyberattacks.

After hearing rumors that hackers were receiving their orders from the Russian government, Slate.com writer Evgeny Morozov enlisted himself as a Russian “cybersoldier” in a research project to “test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure.”

It was pretty easy. After only two or three minutes, Morozov found a way to get his Internet browser to overload a list of Georgian Web sites by automatically sending them thousands of queries. Hacking is a game that almost anyone with a political axe to grind can play.

Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is troubled by the chaos of “hacktivism,” as he describes the grassroots movement. When cyberwarfare shuts down a Web page, it affects governments and news media outlets as well as individual users. And, as shown by the Morozov example, much of the Internet is pretty vulnerable.

That’s Johnson’s critical point. Today the justification for cyberattacks is a nationalist war. Once it’s over, hackers’ next targets could be whatever they felt like going after when they got out of bed that particular morning.

So, instead of imagining hackers as patriotic fighters, Johnson advises seeing them as “a mob of untraceable louts who cause havoc for no real reason other than they can. Think of them as unruly, unhinged and unrepentant – just like the worst trolls you’ve encountered.”

For more about developments in Georgia, see Georgia in Crisis.