Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [21]
According to the administrators of Gaza Hacker Team, pro-Israel activists are also pressuring hosting companies to cut off service to hacker websites. After the Gaza Hacker Team defaced the Kadima party website, they reported that their US-based hosting company denied them service after being subjected to “Jewish” pressure.
Perhaps the most creative tactic employed by Israel’s supporters is the development of a voluntary botnet. Developed by a group of Israeli hacktivists known as Help Israel Win, the distributed denial of service tool called Patriot is designed to attack anti-Israel websites.
Once installed and executed, Patriot opens a connection to a server hosted by Defenderhosting.com. It runs in the background of a PC and does not have a configurable user interface that would allow the user to control which sites to attack. Rather, the server at Defenderhosting.com likely updates the client with the IP addresses to target.
Help Israel Win describes itself as “a group of students who are tired of sitting around doing nothing while the citizens of Sderot and the cities around the Gaza Strip are suffering.” Their stated goal is to create “a project that unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel.” The Help Israel Win website is registered to Ron Shalit of Haifa, Israel.
Control the Voice of the Opposition by Controlling the Content in Cyberspace: Nigeria
Cyber wars are not always fought between states or between nonstate actors; sometimes they are fought between a government and its political opponents. This is precisely the case in Nigeria, where the Information Minister Dora Akunyili, with the support of Nigeria’s President Umaru Yar’adua, has launched a $5 million campaign to support and create government-friendly websites. The objective, according to a June 16, 2009, news report filed by Saharareporters, is “to do everything to ensure that websites like yours (saharareporters.com) and others are stopped from taking root in Nigeria.”
Additionally, the plan calls for paying forum administrators to create discussion threads about topics created by Akunyili that will serve to cast the administration in the most favorable light.
A third plank of the plan accelerates the arrest and detention of opposition bloggers at airports or other entry points into Nigeria. Civil actions against negative posters could include the filing of a libel lawsuit against them by the government.
Are Nonstate Hackers a Protected Asset?
It would seem so. Instances of prosecution of Russian or Chinese hackers involved in foreign website attacks are so few as to be statistically insignificant. A news article written by Xinhua News Agency writers Zhou Zhou and Yuan Ye entitled “Experts: Web Security a pressing challenge in China” for China View (August 8, 2009) relates the pervasive security challenges China’s online population, which numbers almost 340 million, faces. The only illegal acts prosecuted by the PRC are online attacks causing financial harm to China; for example, two men from Yanbian County in Jilin Province were recently arrested and prosecuted for breaking into online banking systems and stealing 2.36 million yuan ($345,269 US). All other types of attacks, according to Li Xiaodong, deputy director of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), fall into a “grey area.”
Similarly, in the Russian Federation, the police are interested only in arresting hackers for financial crimes against Russian companies. Hacking attacks cloaked in nationalism are not only not prosecuted by Russian authorities, but they are encouraged through their proxies, the Russian youth associations,