[Oman-l] Mideast Cyber-War

[BaaboodA@aol.com]

> Pings and E-Arrows Fly in Mideast Cyber-War
> By Lee Hockstader
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Friday, October 27, 2000; Page A01
>
> JERUSALEM, Oct. 26 ** The Web site of Hezbollah, the militantly
> anti-Zionist Islamic guerrilla movement, has a surprising new look.
> Click on the Hezbollah home page and you are greeted by the Israeli
> flag, Hebrew text and a slightly tinny piano recording of "Hatikva,"
> the Israeli national anthem.
>
> A spearhead force of Israeli hackers, augmented by thousands of
> teenage keyboard warriors, launched their Internet assault on
> Hezbollah and other Arab world Web sites earlier this month as
> violence in the region spun out of control.
>
> This week the Arabs struck back with a fury, apparently led by
> pro-Palestinian cyber-soldiers in the United States. In a sustained,
> coordinated counterattack, Web sites of the Israeli army, Foreign
> Ministry, prime minister and parliament, among others, have been
> staggered by a barrage of hundreds of thousands--possibly millions--of
> hostile electronic signals.
>
> "We checked it and for what we found, this is the first full-scale war
> in cyberspace," said Gilad Rabinovich, CEO of NetVision, Israel's
> largest Internet provider. "It's costing a lot of money and human
> resources. . . . Instead of being billable, our technical experts are
> busy protecting the Web sites."
>
> The cyber-war between Arabs and Jews that peaked this week has raged
> parallel to the fighting on the ground, and while it is not deadly, it
> appears to involve at least as many people and all the same passions.
>
> What distinguishes this cyber-conflict from past ones, such as during
> last year's Kosovo war, is that it is not exclusively, or even mainly,
> a cat-and-mouse game of highly specialized hackers attempting to play
> havoc with one another's sites.
>
> Thousands of Israeli and Arab youngsters apparently have also joined
> in the contest, sending the other side nasty, racist and occasionally
> pornographic e-mails and, within their own camps, circulating Web site
> addresses with simple instructions for how to ping, zap and crash the
> enemy's electronic fortresses.
>
> As one of the most computer-literate societies in the world, Israel
> has an immense advantage. There are about 1.1 million Internet hookups
> in the Jewish state, or more than in all 22 Arab countries combined.
>
> But Israel's phenomenal connectedness also means it offers more
> targets and is vastly more vulnerable to attack. And Arabs are finding
> ways to strike back.
>
> For half of Wednesday and virtually all day today, the Israeli Foreign
> Ministry site, an encyclopedic and popular database, has been
> inaccessible as computer technicians work to build stronger firewalls
> to protect it. Also today, following three straight days of concerted
> attacks, the Israeli army announced it had hired AT&T as a backup
> Internet provider in case the electronic firestorm makes access
> impossible through NetVision, its usual server.
>
> "It's a brain war because [of] all the time we need to analyze the
> ways our attackers tried to penetrate the site," Rabinovich said.
> "After we learn what they've done, we have to build the right shields
> to protect [against] it."
>
> Even Israel's right-wing Likud Party has come under a low-tech attack.
> Starting around dawn this morning its Web site was bombarded by
> several thousand e-mails with such messages as "Death to the Jews,"
> "Hell is waiting for you" and obscenities.
>
> Israel, whose extraordinary security-mindedness extends to the
> Internet, appears so far to have prevented the attackers from
> penetrating and meddling with any of its sites. Although Internet
> access in Israel has at times slowed to a crawl, and several sites
> have been forced to suspend operations to fortify themselves, none
> seems to have been breached by invaders.
>
> Israeli hackers, however, seem to have had some success in breaking
> and entering the sites of their enemies, notably Hezbollah.
>
> The heavy-duty Israeli cyber-attacks on Hezbollah apparently began
> about three weeks ago after the Lebanese Shiite guerrillas seized
> three Israeli soldiers on patrol along the border with Lebanon, and
> held them for ransom.
>
> Israelis began circulating among themselves electronic chain letters
> and other messages containing instructions for how to strike back
> against Hezbollah, as well as pro-Palestinian Web sites and portals
> around the Arab world. Many Israelis say they received a half-dozen or
> more such e-mails.
>
> Within days, Hezbollah's site was flooded by millions of "pings"--the
> low-tech cyber-equivalent of knocks on the door. It crashed. Hezbollah
> then tried reviving its site under slightly different spellings, but
> they too were attacked in turn. One of them, www.hizballa.org, was
> penetrated, Hebraized and adorned with the Israeli flag and a galaxy
> of Stars of David.
>
> The chief means that Israelis use to attack Hezbollah and other Arab
> Internet targets seem to be Web sites that make it astonishingly easy
> for even novice surfers to join in the action.
>
> One address offers surfers a menu of targets to attack, including the
> sites of Hezbollah, the Palestinian National Authority, the
> Palestinian militant group Hamas and a half-dozen others.
>
> "Come and help us stop their pan-Arabic campaign of incitement," the
> site says in Hebrew. "Our purpose is not to allow the cruel terror
> organizations to continue with their sites spreading terror, articles
> and sick pictures throughout the Internet."
>
> The site then invites users to click on the targets they would like to
> disable, and offers a set of simple instructions for executing the
> assault. The whole process takes no more than a minute or two, and can
> generate multiple and high-speed attacks.
>
> "It's a very simple yet effective idea based on having people log on,
> and the Web site will automatically do the attacking for them," Ali
> Ayoub, the Hezbollah site webmaster, told the Daily Star, an
> English-language daily in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. "Every time
> a user chooses one of nine sites listed on the Web site, a file is
> activated to target the site every second."
>
> Ayoub's comments, published Tuesday, appear to have contributed to the
> counterattack by Arab Internet users. Internet chat rooms popular
> among Arabs were used to circulate information on how to attack
> Israeli sites.
>
> The Daily Star quoted an unnamed Arab "Internet programmer" as saying
> that some Israeli sites not only had been knocked out of action but
> also badly damaged, their data deleted.
>
> Israeli Internet sources denied that, but acknowledged that a few of
> the attacks had been highly sophisticated.
>
> On both sides of the Internet shootout, Web site officials denounce
> the conflict. Some Israelis say it is the work of bored teenagers
> spoiling for an antiseptic fight.
>
> "Sometimes it's a 14-year-old guy who calls himself the Red Dragon,"
> said Gadi Shimshon, editor of an Internet portal in Tel Aviv called
> Nana. "These are kids' games. Every kid nowadays has an Internet
> connection, and they can do it. . . . Hormones are awful at this age."
>
> Others contend the attacks in cyberspace are more pernicious, and
> amount to an assault on free expression itself.
>
> "Destroying an innocent site here or there is crude vandalism, it is
> not an act of war," said Ori Noy, director of the information division
> of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "Shutting down a site is like burning
> books. And in another era this was very symbolic. We are talking about
> the Nazi era."
>
> One Israeli lawmaker, former science minister Michael Eitan of the
> hard-line Likud Party, said he favored international agreements and
> legislation criminalizing attacks on Web sites, whether by Israelis or
> anyone else.
>
> "I'd like to see that real enemies who want to kill each other--that
> they still should respect freedom of press, the rights of reporters,
> of safe transport for the Red Cross and the injured, and also for the
> Internet, which should be protected by agreement," he said.
>
> "Even sides in a state of war shouldn't bring the war to the Internet
> because the Internet is something international. It was not
> established for war but as an arena to exchange views and make
> connections."
>
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