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Cyber War: The Civilians’ War and Politics
By Dina Rashed
It only seems natural in an information age high tech world that war would change to more information-like tactics. Hacking is becoming more than ever a threat to companies, governments, organizations bridging over borders and security measures.
Actually, it is now called Hacktivism, a term that reflects the frequency of piracy activities over Internet sites. When the Internet was gaining momentum nearly two decades ago, cyber hacking was the way genius computer programmers and users would show off their talents by breaking into secure site which some times included military establishment sites.
Recently political conflicts have been the motives behind the increasing hacktivism on governments and group sites.
Currently the hottest spot is the Middle East.
The Mid-East cyber conflict first started on Sept. 29, the first day of the latest Palestinian uprising. Two Hezbollah Web sites,
www.hizbollah.org and www.hizballah.org were bombarded by outside sources, slowing them down.
As the events intensified and Hezbollah group captured three Israeli soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanese border, hoping swap them for imprisoned group members in Israel, the Web attacks intensified and on Oct. 16 Hezbollah’s sites crashed under the pressure of nine million hits. The site has been equipped to serve between 100,000 to 300,000 hits a day.
The latest in the Israeli offensive is a www.hizballa.org, which is meant to lure people who try to reach the real site but misspell the URL. An Israeli flag has been posted on the site with the word “WAR” written in flames above it. The Israeli national anthem plays in the background.
Another Israeli Web site instructed its viewers to “attack and destroy” Hezbollah online.
Israeli sites leading the charge against Hezbollah list their targets including the Web sites of al Manar, Hezbollah’s television station, the Palestinian National Authority and the Islamic militant group Hamas — with military precision. Site visitors are asked to click on a button that reads, “Press Here to Destroy.”
By clicking, the user activates a script that hits the targeted Web site once every second. Ali Ayoub, Hezbollah’s Webmaster said many of the attacks originate from university campuses in the United States and Canada, where 24-hour high-speed connections allow pro-Israel surfers to keep their Web browsers open all day and night, vastly multiplying the number of hits on a site.
As cyber surfers knew of the deliberate attack, it spurred some kind of a chain reaction. A grass-roots counter attack has spawned two sites that called on users to join the “defenders of the resistance” in attacking Israeli Web sites.
On a black background with yellow writing in English and Arabic, the sites list three targets: the sites of the Israeli government and army, and the Web site that is currently attacking Hezbollah.
It didn’t take long for the battle cry to be heard. Arab surfers attacked the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web
site, neutralizing it for several hours on two different occasions this week.
The website of the Israeli parliament was paralyzed after being penetrated by hackers believed by officials to be based in Saudi Arabia.
And the foreign ministry website has been down after being overwhelmed by floods of incoming mail.
The Prime Minister's Office and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have also came under attack.
One of the popular techniques that has been used in the virtual war is the dispatch of millions and millions of messages to a particular website all at once. The technique was employed and registered through NetVision, Israel's biggest Internet Service Provider (ISP) and the host of the main Palestinian National Authority (PNA) website.
Consequently, the company had to upgrade its firewalls to shield its Internet service from manipulation by outsiders.
However, NetVision went into temporary shock with many of its computers breaking down for several hours, and the company's sites and e-mail service stopped functioning.
Israeli engineers at NetVision claimed the attacks were coming from Lebanon, US, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.
But attacks on official Palestinian and Israeli websites were taking place simultaneously. This was obvious in the case of the attacks on the websites of the PNA and that of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Both sites were crashed by endless messages sent from various Internet locations.
Meanwhile, websites of the Israeli Knesset and Israeli Army have also been attacked but have not crashed. However, some reports said the Knesset website was bombarded with viruses that halted its operation for some time. It was reported later that both the army and the Knesset employed a US firm that specializes in protection of websites to upgrade their security.
The PNA site was attacked constantly for two days in late October resulting in the display of pornography and Jewish slogans. The attacks were apparently coming from computers located at the Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.
Ironically, NetVision has been asked to cut its services to the PNA site and calls to the Israeli public to boycott the company if it does not comply. The calls have been gaining momentum and many Israelis are seriously considering canceling their accounts with the company and moving to another ISP.
The spillover to the U.S.
Some American companies and organization fell under such attacks for their affiliations and ties in the boiling region.
The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most influential lobbying group in the country, was one of the first organizations to suffer a cyber attack.
A report by the Wall Street Journal said a hacker gained access to credit card numbers and other personal information about AIPAC members, and left anti-Israel messages on the site. The report quoted an AIPAC spokesperson as saying the hacker was able to see credit card information belonging to some 200 members and profiles of some 700 members who had visited the Web site to buy items or pay membership dues.
The Journal said the hacker, who called himself "Doctor Nuker," contacted the newspaper via e-mail and online chat sessions and said the AIPAC attack was his way of protesting "the atrocities against Palestinians and the rude behavior of the US and its help for Israel."
He said he published the private information about some of the lobbying group's contributors because "they are the supporters of Israel too."
Recently, the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), the FBI's cyber crime division, warned it had discovered numerous Web sites advocating cyber warfare against both Israeli and pro-Palestinian Web sites.
"Due to the credible threat of terrorist acts in the Middle East region, and the conduct of these Web attacks, recipients should exercise increased vigilance to the possibility that US government and private sector Web sites may become potential targets," the NIPC said.
Some media reports said that the American giant AT&T could be targeted for its business in Israel, specially since the IDF decided to use it as its ISP instead of NetVision following the attacks, and a failed attempt to hack Lucent Technologies last week followed a series of attacks originating in the unsettled region
Now it is War
Israeli officials and experts fear the escalation of these attacks and have been calling to criminalize them, but the pro-Palestinian hacktivists say that Israel was the one who initiated this kind of attack by hitting Hezbollah.
“This technique of attacking Web sites ... is an unacceptable act of virtual terrorism,” Ori Noy, director of the information division at the foreign ministry, told the Jerusalem Post.
Michael Eitan, head of the Knesset's [Israeli parliament] Internet committee, stated that the online world should not be a "potential battleground,” and that cyber hacking should be considered an international crime.
But this position seems contradicting to how the Israeli society accepted previous hacking incidents that originated from Israel.
In February 1999, a14-year-old Nir Zigdon's has been feted in Israel after he sent a virus by e-mail to the site - www.iraq.com - after reading about allegedly anti-Semitic sites in PC-Media magazine.
He said: “I destroyed the site because it contained lies about the United States and Israel and propaganda against Jews,” the BBC reported at the time.
Nir said he had received more than 100 phone calls from Israelis congratulating him after his story was published in the daily Maariv newspaper.
He said he was working on destroying several other "anti-Israeli" sites, and that the Internet was “a place for different kinds of wars, like against Nazis who are against Jews and Arabs against Jews.”
In another incident, several Israeli companies reported last year that neo-Nazis had hacked into their sites to avenge the destruction of their sites by Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum, known as The Analyzer.
Tenenbaum has destroyed several neo-Nazi and anti-Israeli Websites.
Other regional conflicts
But what takes place in the Middle East is not news in other parts of the world, which are suffering ferocious political and military confrontations.
On 20 October 1998, the Kosovo Information Center (KIC), which supports the party of the ethnic Albanian leader, Dr Ibrahim Rugova, reported that hackers claiming to be members of the Serbian terrorist organization Crna Ruka [Black Hand] hacked its Web page.
The hackers posted a copy of the Serbian national symbol, and captions in Serbian and English:
“Welcome to the Web page of the biggest liars and killers!” and “Brother Albanians, this coat of arms will be in your flag as long as you exist!”
After contacting the provider in New York the pages were restored, but the hackers soon returned with a vengeance.
"This site is hacked by Serbian Hackers Team Crna Ruka.
Long Live Great Serbia!!!” their new posting read.
Earlier, the independent Belgrade-based news agency Beta reported that a Serb hacker had forced a Swiss Internet provider to withdraw an edition of the Kosovar Albanian newspaper Glas Kosova from the Internet, by posting anti-Kosovo Albanian messages on the newspaper's Website.
The provider managed to contact the hacker in Poland, who said he was a Yugoslav student. But when he noticed he was being monitored, he damaged the hard disk of one of the Swiss provider's computers.
On 16 October 1998, the Indian news agency PTI reported that "suspected Pakistani intelligence operatives" had "hijacked the Indian army's only Website, Kashmir A Paradise, which gives the Indian view on Kashmir.
Some defense ministry officials expressed their urgency to have an Internet policy to counter such attacks, but months later, an Indian Supreme court lawyer, Pawan Duggal, told PTI that India was "totally ill-equipped to tackle the onslaught of cyber crimes".
The site was soon back to normal, but a week after the attack the homepage still warned: "Desperate hacker keeps on trying," "3 attempts in 3 days".
In Belarus, the Website of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been repeatedly hacked into, the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
On one occasion, hackers opened a new Website with an image of Lukashenka "which starts turning, before your very eyes, first into Hitler, then into Stalin, then back into Lukashenka," the paper said in July.
Final Remarks:
One of the important aspects of the Middle East virtual war is that it is a war where the two sides have almost equal capabilities to attack the other, contrary to the military real war where the Israeli side has a quantitative and qualitative superiority over the Palestinian/Lebanese side.
Israeli society is more likely to suffer in this fight. Attacks on the Israeli sites would be more damaging than attacks on the Palestinian or the Lebanese site (like Hezbollah). With its high Tech industry and technologically advanced sectors, more Israeli companies and organizations provide services to its customers over the Internet than would any Palestinian counterparts.
This is a new form of war, where the rules of the traditional war do not apply. There are no boundaries, no cease-fire, hardly any monitoring on its weapons, far less costly than physical war and any additional troops (sympathizing hackers who may volunteer to either side) could join in at any time.
So far it has been a civilized war with no bloodshed and no physical casualties, but this may not last for long. David J. Farber, an Internet pioneer who serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, says that as dependency on the Internet increases, cyber warriors will do real damage. Businesses will collapse if customers can't reach them online, power grids might be brought down with a mouse click.
While most nations have laws against cyber crime, the only existing international agreement is the Draft Convention on Cybercrime, issued by the Council of Europe with U.S. cooperation. The proposal reiterates the necessity to "deter actions directed against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer systems, networks and computer data, as well as the misuse of such systems, networks and data.” The draft is expected to be finalized by the end of this year.
It would be hard to tell how far the Web War would escalate in the Middle East and if it would end by any ending of the clashes on the ground.
Also the same tactics utilized by either side could quickly be targeted against any other government, corporation or organization, should their profile rise high enough in the attack group circles. There is not much in the way of warning before such an attack would occur.
Experts have mentioned that some of the prime targets may include major Egyptian and US government agencies, AT&T, Yahoo or even CNN.
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