ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of historians who have documented what has actually happened in the past when the lights have gone out as a result of natural disaster, accident, or intentional attack. It looks at several of the largest cyberattacks to date that have been deployed as evidence in support of cyber-doom rhetoric. The cyberattacks mainly took two forms, distributed denial of service attacks and web-site defacements. The cyberattacks in question came in the context of an armed struggle between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. Alongside the physical conflict, there was also a series of cyberattacks on Georgia that caught the world’s attention, in part because the cyberattacks actually began in July 2008, preceding the physical invasion by several weeks. The attacks against Ukraine included two on the electrical grid that succeeded in shutting down power for a portion of the population for a short period of time in 2015 and again in 2016.
