'Hacktivism': Mideast cyberwar heats up

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2650300,00.html

By Robert Lemos, ZDNN
November 6, 2000 7:38 AM PT

An online battle between Israeli and Palestinian vandals escalated
this week with the theft and public posting of a database containing
the personal information of 700 members of the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee on Wednesday and the posting of information by
Israeli-affiliated hackers regarding Palestinian communications.

"This is no different than in the real world, where activists have
gone into terrorism," said Paul Robertson, a senior analyst with
security services provider TrueSecure Inc., formerly ICSA.net. "The
big issue now is how are we going to defend against it."

More than 180 people, most of them Palestinian, have lost their lives
during six weeks of violence in the Middle East.

On Friday, two more Palestinian citizens died during clashes between
Israeli soldiers and demonstrators.

Until this week, the groups supporting either side had limited their
online activities to defacements and denial-of-service attacks against
Web sites affiliated with the Palestinian movement or Israeli
nationalists.

Dozens of sites affected More than 30 sites have been defaced or taken
off the Net by pro-Palestinian cybervandals, many from Pakistan, and
almost 20 other sites have been likewise disrupted by their Israeli
counterparts.

But that changed on Wednesday afternoon, when the AIPAC Web site was
replaced by another decrying the violence in the Middle East and
denigrating Jewish people.

"The hack is to protest against the atrocities in Palestine by the
barbarian Israeli soldiers and their constant support by the U.S.
government," stated a Pakistani Web vandal using the handle "Doctor
Nuker," the founder of the Pakistani Hackerz Club.

In addition, Doctor Nuker broke into two databases that AIPAC had kept
on its Web site: one containing 3,100 e-mail addresses of those people
interested in updates on the Israeli crisis and another containing the
personal information of 700 members, including about 200 credit cards.

So far, only one case of fraud has been reported as a result of the
database theft and public posting of those card numbers.

Allowing such information to be accessed from the Web is considered a
mistake by security experts, said Robertson. "If they had been using
(our practices), this would not have happened," he said. "We require
all our client to keep databases off the Web server."

Calling in the feds AIPAC has already contacted the FBI, which is
investigating the matter, as well as other government agencies that
spokesman Ken Bricker refused to name. "We have done everything
humanly possible to get the word out," said Bricker.

AIPAC, a relatively new member of the Web community, is trying its
best to protect its members, said Bricker, but he pointed to the hacks
of Microsoft and the military as examples of how difficult such a task
is.

"If Microsoft and the Pentagon can't protect their own sites, then no
one can."

Far from ending, the online conflict seems to be getting worse, said
Fred Cohen, a computer-security professor, consultant and researcher.

"This represents an escalation. Each side is going to fight harder and
harder," he said.

Israelis strike back On Friday, MAGLAN, an Israeli information warfare
research lab, reported that "Polo0," a Israeli supporter, posted
Palestinian leaders' cell phone numbers, plus information about
accessing the telephone and fax systems of the Palestinian Authority,
as well as 24 different Web sites, 15 IRC channels, and an IRC server
through which the Palestinian movement communicates.

Supporters have also posted automated tools aimed at flooding
Palestinian sites with garbage data, effectively removing them from
the Internet.

Cohen thinks more attacks, and of a worse nature, are sure to come.

"When you talk about war, you are talking about turning off the
constraints that hold back people," he said. "You have people who want
to break into computers, and now they have an excuse -- they can do it
for a cause."


*==============================================================*
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without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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