[Air-l] Re: Denial of Service attack against al Jazeera

[Alexandra Samuel]

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 at fas.harvard.edu
http://www.alexandrasamuel.com