I browse CNN.com every day to get my news on what’s happening around the world. Indeed, it was the first way I learned of the recent invasion of the Republic of Georgia by Russia. The more details have trickled in, the more I am following the events leading up to and during the invasion. However, today, I read something on their front page that made me stop in my tracks.

In their article, “U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say,” it describes how a highly-organized effort by Russian hackers preceeded the land invasion with a crippling cyber-attack (though the Russian government denies involvement). The move defaced the Georgian president’s website with images of Adolf Hitler, but other targets were much more damaging.

Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.

U.S. experts are saying that due to our particular reliance on the internet, we are at risk and are vulnerable to even more wide-spread effects than what Georgia has gone through. For all of us developers and designers, a shutdown of networks and server communication could be devastating. Even the downtime of a single day can wind up setting projects back several more, not to mention the potential for considerable data loss. While (hopefully) we all keep our backup servers and hard drives updated consistently, the setbacks of the loss of a week’s worth of mockups, wireframes, coding and other electronic documents and materials can be considerable.

The article mentions that this may be the first recorded instance of a cyber-attack coordinated with a land invasion. In this era of remote accessibility and dependency on the internet, I sincerely doubt it will be the last. For those of us whose careers are tied to the web, we now have a demonstrative example of why we need to be more aware of our workfiles and workflows, and how such an attack could grind our industry to a halt.