2600.com: Hackers are blamed again

[Pluto <pluto -! - stderr - de>]

Anstiftung zu DDoS durch Personen aus der .mil Domain, again.

http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/1592

HACKERS BLAMED FOR AL-JAZEERA OUTAGE
Posted 26 Mar 2003 10:49:42 UTC

Once again, hackers are taking the blame for a denial of service attack
which almost anyone with the desire and decent net connectivity could have
accomplished.

The difference in this case is that hackers are being drawn into the
military conflict between the United States and Iraq. The site in question
belongs to Al-Jazeera, an Arabic news organization based in Qatar. And
according to this Washington Post story, "many Americans" were angered by
that network's rebroadcast of Iraqi television's video of captured and
killed American soldiers. By making the leap that hackers were responsible
for the massive attack which started Tuesday morning, hackers are
mistakenly viewed as some kind of cybersoldier dedicated to carrying out
American military policy.

This isn't the first time we've seen this kind of thing. When the American
spy plane crashed in China a few years ago, we received quite a few pieces
of mail from outraged people demanding that we do something about China by
attacking them through the net. We looked at the IP addresses for each of
the pieces of email we received and every last one of them went back to
various .mil addresses. So much for a spontaneous uprising of the
people. But in the end, eventually somebody did launch an attack on
Chinese websites and hackers got the blame - or credit. And then the whole
thing happened in the other direction as well. It was almost funny. 

< ... snip ... >


 Gruss

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