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

[david silver]

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