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Cyberscuffles Follow Terrorist Attacks


Evidence of attacks on Web sites with ties to the Middle East reported.

By George V. Hulme
InformationWeek
September 13, 2001 12:00 AM (From the September 10, 2001 issue)

The U.S. government has not yet publicly named any person or group as the perpetrators of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, but there's evidence of attacks on Web sites with ties to the Middle East.

Edward Skoudis, VP of security strategy for security services company Predictive Systems Inc., says it was "eerily quiet" on the Internet after the attacks Tuesday on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "The script kiddies had their eyes glued to the TV tube like everyone else," Skoudis says. But two days after the attack, Skoudis says he has noticed evidence of hacking activity against Middle Eastern domains.

Chris Rouland, director of X-Force, the research team for security software and services vendor Internet Security Systems Inc., says his researchers have noticed sporadic but not yet intense attack attempts, from both the West and Middle East. "So far, it's mostly been a lot of talking smack going on in hacker chat rooms," says Rouland, who adds that researchers have noticed the beginnings of what could be real distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Sunil Misra, managing principal for the Unisys Corp.'s e-Security and privacy practice, isn't surprised to see cyberscuffles started by politically motivated hackers and script kiddies (security-speak for hacker wannabes who run pre-written "scripts" that exploit known software vulnerabilities), but warns "we don't want to escalate this into something it is not. Let the FBI and government do their jobs."

Rouland agrees: "Many of these attacks will end up being misguided in nature."

One writer to the SecurityFocus "Incidents" security mailing list said, "Something important for all of the patriotic script kiddies out there to think about: If you want to do your nation a favor, lock your desktop, then go out and give blood."


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