Image copyright Pirveli A huge cyber-attack which knocked out more than 2,000 websites in the country of Georgia last year was sponsored by Russia, the UK has said.
Georgian national TV was also targeted in the October attack.
The UK government said the GRU, or Russian military intelligence, was behind the “attempt to undermine Georgia’s sovereignty”.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab described the attack as “totally unacceptable”.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said that the GRU was “almost certainly” behind the attacks, which affected pages including the presidential website. It said the attack was the first significant example of GRU cyber-attacks since 2017.
In many cases, website homepages were replaced with an image of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, and the caption “I’ll be back”.
“The scale of this attack is something we haven’t seen before,” Prof Alan Woodward, cyber-security expert at Surrey University in the UK, said at the time.
Who is Mikheil Saakashvili?
Mr Saakashvili served two terms as president in Georgia between 2004 and 2013.
He gave up his Georgian citizenship in 2015, when he become governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region.
He was deported from Ukraine in 2018 after falling out with his predecessor – but his Ukrainian citizenship was restored in May 2019.
Mr Saakashvili is wanted in Georgia on criminal charges, which he claims are politically motivated.
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