Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [19]
DNS Team
DNS Team is an active Arab hackers team focused primarily on apolitical hacking. However, it occasionally exhibits politically motivated attacks—targeting websites in Denmark and the Netherlands during the fall of 2008 in retaliation for the cartoon controversy, and it participated in recent anti-Israeli hacks. DNS Team maintains a hacking and security forum at http://www.v4-team.com/cc/.
!TeAm RaBaT-SaLe! (aka Team Rabat-Sale or Team Rabat-Sala)
Team Rabat-Sale (named after the two Moroccan cities of Rabat and Sale) is unique because it has participated in this campaign and garnered press coverage without actually targeting Israeli websites. Instead, the group targets a variety of websites (probably opportunistic hacks; the group seems to specialize in websites using Linux) and then leaves startling messages and Jihadist imagery. It may reason that if the whole Western world is against the citizens of Gaza, any English-language website is a conduit for their message. They have recorded 380 such defacements on the Arabic Mirror site and 196 on zone-h. Their members go by the aliases Mr. Tariklam, Mr. Sabirano, X-Diablo, Mr. Konan, and Virus T.
Team Rabat-Sale’s graffiti features the message, “For the Kids of Gaza...This Hack iS To DeFend Islam That Has Been Harrased by Denmark and USA and Israel.” The defacement includes an image of a sword piercing a skull with a Star of David on it, surrounded by skulls with the US, UK, and Danish flags superimposed on them.
On another Team Rabat-Sale defacement, a Jihadist anthem commonly used as the soundtrack to insurgent videos plays in the background. It also features a picture of Osama Bin Laden, as well as a Team Rabat-Sale group logo depicting a Kalashnikov and crossed swords against a globe, with a Salafist flag waving from the barrel of the weapon. It includes an image that may imply a threat against a tractor-trailer truck. The photograph of the masked man with a laptop and a handgun by his side suggests physical violence in addition to cyber mischief.
DZ Team
DZ Team consists of Algerian and Egyptian hackers who use the aliases AOxideA, Maxi32, Skins, The Legend, Cyb3r-Devil, and The Moorish. It first made headlines in April 2008 when it hacked the Bank of Israel website over Passover weekend. DZ Team defaced several Israeli websites during Operation Cast Lead, including the Israeli portals of Volkswagen, Burger King, and Pepsi, the website of Israeli defense contractor BVR systems, the Kadima party website, and the Hillel Yaffe hospital website. Videos of the group’s successful defacements were posted to YouTube.
In an interview following its hack of the Bank of Israel site, members of the group reached by the press claimed they were religiously motivated: “We do everything in the name of Allah,” said one of them. Although one member of DZ team expressed support for suicide bombers in the interview, another stressed that the group members were not terrorists themselves. According to the interview, one member of the team specializes in creating Trojan horses, and another, a Hebrew-speaking Egyptian, specializes in locating security breaches.
Ashianeh Security Group
The Iranian Fars News Agency reported that the Ashianeh Security Group hacked 400 Israeli websites, including the websites of the Mossad and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. The group does not seem to participate in online hacker forums. It is possibly state-supported.
Nimr al-Iraq (“The Tiger of Iraq”) and XX_Hacker_XX
Nimr al-Iraq provides advice and links to download tools on hacker forums, especially the soqor.net forum. He is credited with updating the al-Durrah distributed denial of service tool for use during Operation Cast Lead (see the next section, ). He also provided links to download a remote access tool (RAT) program called hackattack, which permits hackers to gain remote control of another person’s computer. According to his profile on soqor.net, Nimr al-Iraq