http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend27_20030327.htm BY MIKE WENDLAND FREE PRESS COLUMNIST March 27, 2003 The Iraq war has unleashed a wave of attacks aimed at defacing Web sites as a form of protest. The Overseas Security Advisory Council, a group established by the State Department and U.S.-based corporations that operate abroad, puts the number of hacker attacks at more than 2,500. The council warned its members that the longer the war continues, the more hacking incidents they can expect. "These digital attacks are causing business disruptions through online vandalism of commerce portals and computers belonging to businesses," said the warning. "Government and military systems are also being targeted." Think of it as the information age's electronic equivalent of graffiti protests. And it's not all antiwar sentiment being expressed. A U.S.-based group called Hackweiser has been defacing dozens of small Web sites with slogans like "HOORAY FOR WAR!" The new English Web site run by the Arabic Al-Jazeera TV network (http://english.aljazeera.net) remained largely inaccessible for a second day Wednesday because of what are known as denial of service attacks, in which hackers bombard a site with so many requests for access that the computer servers running the site crash. Rich Mogull, a research director for Gartner Inc., information-technology research firm, says most large corporations have adequate security to foil the attacks, which he describes as generally unsophisticated and dependent on known security flaws. Ford Motor Co., for example, says it has had no problems with anyone trying to hack into its dozens of public and private Web sites. Scott Bailey, director of information risk management for Rehmann Consulting's Troy office, said he's seeing an increase in unsuccessful attempts to get into secure systems: "It's not the big corporations that are being targeted. It's more typically small and medium-sized companies that get nailed. So far these have been pretty unsophisticated incidents and basic security is keeping them out." Besides the Web page defacements, security experts have identified four worms and viruses being spread as attachments to e-mail that try to exploit interest in the Iraq war, according to F-Secure, a Helsinki, Finland-based company that makes antivirus software. One of the worms, called Prune, has a subject line like "U.S. Government Material -- Iraq Crisis." F-Secure says it is likely aimed at people with friends and relatives in the military who are very keen to get any kind of information about the crisis and can be tricked into opening the attachment and thus activating the worm, which then tries to erase operating system files. Details are at www.f-secure.com/virus-info/iraq.shtml. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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