Re: Denial of Service attack against al Jazeera
A few points to keep in mind re: the downing of the Al Jazeera web site this week: 1) There were reportedly 2 different incidents. One was a loss of service that was probably due to a denial of service attack, but could conceivably be due to a traffic overload. If it was a denial of service attack, it could (and most likely was) the work of just one or two crackers. The other was a domain hijacking in which would-be visitors to Al Jazeera's web site were redirected to (over time) a few different sites, including ones featuring porn and pro-US slogans. 2) This kind of thing has become a totally standard part of international conflicts. Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, and Chinese and US crackers have defaced and attacked each other's sites for years. Nobody should be very surprised to see Arab OR American sites attacked these days, and frankly, it's not worth reading too much into these kind of attacks. Experience with other conflicts suggests that this kind of activity is mostly undertaken by teens or young men (mostly men), working alone or in very small groups. It's hard to judge whether they speak for many Americans. 3) There's no reason to assume that the US government is behind these attacks, even if some people with .mil addresses were encouraging such behaviour (for which I'd want to see some hard evidence, anyhow). The only evidence of any government-backed hacking was some stuff against Falun Gong web sites, a few years ago, that might have been backed by China...and even that was sketchy. If anyone found real evidence that the US government was sponsoring this hacking it would be interesting, but surprising....As the reactions on this list indicate, it's not the most effective way of selling a message. These are certainly not the last such attacks we'll see as the war wears on. I think the most important thing to remember, and to underline for students and for the media, is that this is NOT "cyber-terrorism". It's more like cyber-graffiti. After all, nobody got physically injured or even endangered by the attacks on the Al Jazeera web site. Wish I could say the same for what's going on in the Iraqi desert... Alex -- Alexandra Samuel samuel@fas.harvard.edu http://www.alexandrasamuel.com
Alex, thanks for your detailed email. can you say a bit more about why you would not characterize this as cyber-terrorism? i'm curious to hear more. peace, david On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Alexandra Samuel wrote:
A few points to keep in mind re: the downing of the Al Jazeera web site this week:
1) There were reportedly 2 different incidents. One was a loss of service that was probably due to a denial of service attack, but could conceivably be due to a traffic overload. If it was a denial of service attack, it could (and most likely was) the work of just one or two crackers. The other was a domain hijacking in which would-be visitors to Al Jazeera's web site were redirected to (over time) a few different sites, including ones featuring porn and pro-US slogans.
2) This kind of thing has become a totally standard part of international conflicts. Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, and Chinese and US crackers have defaced and attacked each other's sites for years. Nobody should be very surprised to see Arab OR American sites attacked these days, and frankly, it's not worth reading too much into these kind of attacks. Experience with other conflicts suggests that this kind of activity is mostly undertaken by teens or young men (mostly men), working alone or in very small groups. It's hard to judge whether they speak for many Americans.
3) There's no reason to assume that the US government is behind these attacks, even if some people with .mil addresses were encouraging such behaviour (for which I'd want to see some hard evidence, anyhow). The only evidence of any government-backed hacking was some stuff against Falun Gong web sites, a few years ago, that might have been backed by China...and even that was sketchy. If anyone found real evidence that the US government was sponsoring this hacking it would be interesting, but surprising....As the reactions on this list indicate, it's not the most effective way of selling a message.
These are certainly not the last such attacks we'll see as the war wears on. I think the most important thing to remember, and to underline for students and for the media, is that this is NOT "cyber-terrorism". It's more like cyber-graffiti. After all, nobody got physically injured or even endangered by the attacks on the Al Jazeera web site. Wish I could say the same for what's going on in the Iraqi desert...
Alex
-- Alexandra Samuel samuel@fas.harvard.edu http://www.alexandrasamuel.com
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participants (2)
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Alexandra Samuel -
david silver