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A diagram of the daily traffic rank trend for the website
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By
Ahmed El-Sheikh, IOL Staff
CAIRO,
March 26 (IslamOnline.net) - IslamOnline.net website was downed by a
hacking process likely by suspected Israeli entities for three hours
Thursday, March 25.
The website went off line on 03:50 pm GMT, and the users could not have access until 06:30.
The
attacks had started as of Monday, March 22, the day when the Hamas
spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed was assassinated by Israeli occupation
forces.
The
website made an extensive coverage of the killing, publishing earlier
interviews with Sheikh Yassin and speaking to other Hamas leaders.
IOL
also ran a poll
, in which 90.85 percent of the 7556 respondents said the
assassination would not bring in the long-awaited security to the
Israelis.
The
Alexa traffic rank - which reflects both the number of users who visit
web sites as well as the number of pages viewed by those users - put
IslamOnline.net on the list of the 1,500 sites mostly surfed by the
cyber community.
Alexa
found the reach rank for the site hitting its highest increase of 14
per cent in the last three months.
The
site’s technical support experts managed to foil all hacking
attempts during the last three days.
The
site faces up to more than 250 hacking attempts a day.
Cyber
War
Meanwhile,
the dialogue forums of IslamOnline.net have been witnessing a
ferocious cyber war since the extrajudicial killing of Sheikh Yassin,
in which more than 1,000 individuals joined in Arabic and English.
The
pro-Israel participants - who were keen to ascertain their identities
- launched a scathing attack on Sheikh Yassin, calling him a murderer,
barbarian and a terrorist.
The
site for Hamas, the biggest resistance Palestinian group that carries
out operations against Israel, was also hacked the same day Ariel
Sharon took office as Prime Minister in 2001, few months after the
Intifada erupted.
Visitors,
including journalists, anticipating Hamas press releases were
re-directed to pornographic websites.
Solved
IOL
technical experts said the servers of the site escaped unscathed after
hacking the site which was done through message dumping.
Floods
of messages requesting a new program offered on the site led to the
inability of all world users to see it, they said.
The
service returned to normal after the traffic of messages was jammed,
the technicians added.
Facing
Intifada
Several
similar Muslim and Arab sites have come under attack from Israeli
hackers since the eruption of Intifadah in September 2001.
Israeli
hackers crashed several Hezbollah-related web sites as a case in
point.
Israeli
hackers then assailed a Lebanese Internet company for what was
believed to be an act of reprisal for its hosting of a
Hezbollah-maintained television station, al-Manar.
The
hackers left a message that the portal was taken over by the Mossad,
the Israeli intelligence service.
In
March 2001, two virus-infected messages targeted
one of the most used news servers by Muslims and Arabs, the Muslim
Student Association News (MSANEWS).
Attachments
sent to the subscribers bore the name of Yassin, named after the Hamas
spiritual leader whom Palestinians consider a symbol of the Intifada.
Observers
said that official parties could be involved in the hacking, usually
made by experts able to evade measures imposed by internet security
companies.
On
March 2003, hackers downed
the Al-Jazeera website after the Qatar-based channel aired pictures of
a number of U.S. soldiers captured and killed in Iraq seven days after
the start of the Anglo-American offensive.
In
the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, Internet hackers
are already calling for "revenge" attacks against Muslim and
Arab websites.
At
incidents.org, a website run by SANS (System Administration,
Networking, and Security) Institute, there is a string of postings
from U.S. newsgroups calling for an attack on Arab and Islamic
websites.
