Georgia today accused Russia of waging a parallel ‘cyber-war’, using hacking techniques to block key Georgian government websites.

There was confusion as to the extent of the attacks, however, with at least two independent internet monitoring companies saying they had seen no evidence of large scale attacks on Georgian government infrastructure.

Hackers using so-called 'denial of service' attacks - where websites are bombarded with millions of hits, causing them to crumble - had taken down the website of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), a Georgian Government spokesman said.

According to one report, hackers at one point replaced the image on the MFA website with one of President Saakashvili alongside Adolf Hitler.

The measures, which the spokesman insisted were the work of Russian hackers, had forced the MFA to set up an alternative website hosted by the Google-owned blogging service, Blogger, to disseminate information.

Throughout the day, the Blogger site was updated with images and other details of what the MFA claimed were the latest Russia-backed attacks.

Separately, a website claiming to track the movements of the Russian Business Network, a web-based criminal organisation, claimed that a cyber-war waged by Russia was "underway in parallel with conventional warfare," and that many of Georgia internet servers had been "under external control" since late last week.

The site gave examples of Georgian servers that had been blocked to web users outside Georgia and appealed for "international assistance" to provide extra equipment to ensure that messages could continue to be sent out of the country.

Two web monitoring companies contacted by The Times said, however, that they had not seen evidence of any significant attack on Georgian government infrastructure of the sort that affected Estonia's computer systems in May last year.

Netcraft, a Bath-based company which provides security and other internet services, said that one Georgian site it monitored regularly - that of the Georgian Times newspaper - showed no signs of having been affected.

Heise, the German security company, said meanwhile that although there had been some "low-level vandalism" on Georgian websites, there was no evidence of "widescale, state-sanctioned, electronic warfare".

A spokesman for the Georgian government claimed that two other Georgian state websites - that of the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Internal Affairs - were affected by the attacks.

The Ministry of Defence website appeared to be inaccessible from the UK late today, though the MIA website appeared to be working normally.

The spokesman, who worked for a Brussels-based PR agency, also said that the claims had been verified by an Estonian web security company CERT which had experience dealing with the attacks that were blamed on Russian authorities last year.

A spokesman for CERT, based in Tallinn, was not immediately available for comment.

A source close to Google said that a blog using its Blogger service was purporting to represent the views of the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs but added that it was impossible to confirm the veracity of the blog.

In May last year, Estonia accused Russia of waging cyber-war against it by launching a series of attacks on its computer systems which paralysed websites and telephone networks as part of a campaign of unofficial sanctions.

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