Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [61]
In his self-published book, The Dark Visitor, Scott Henderson wrote that he was astounded when he first began researching Chinese hacker groups. He had initially hoped to find a few Chinese citizens talking about their alliance, but what he ultimately uncovered was extensive, well-organized, and massive—a hacker community consisting of over 250 websites and forums.
The China West Hacker Union website, for example, had 2,659 main topics and 7,461 postings. This was a fairly average number of documents for a Chinese hacker website; some sites, such as KKER, had well over 20,000.
Unlike hackers from other countries, Chinese hackers tend not to use Facebook or other social networks, preferring an instant messaging service called QQ instead.
The Middle East
The following are websites utilized by Arabic hackers:
http://www.arabic-m.com
Now defunct, this was the address for The Arabic Mirror website, where hackers advertise exploits. It contained a section devoted specifically to defacements related to the Gaza crisis, where the websites targeted were Israeli or Western and the “graffiti” contained messages about the crisis. The administrators identified themselves as The_5p3trum and BayHay.
The Arabic Mirror website has a password-protected forum with information about hacking and security vulnerabilities, among other subjects. Its moderator is Pr!v4t3 Hacker, who identifies himself as a 16-year-old from the Palestinian territories and a member of Kaspers Hackers Crew, which is involved in hacking Israeli websites.
http://www.soqor.net
The Hacker Hawks website. is hosted in Arabic and includes an active forum with discussions on IT security and security vulnerabilities. Information intended to assist hackers in attacking specific targets is exchanged, such as vulnerabilities of certain servers, usernames and passwords to access administrator accounts for specific websites, and lists of Israeli IP addresses. The website may also facilitate financial crime: one post included a ZIP file allegedly containing a collection of credit card numbers from an online bookstore.
The Hacker Hawks website includes a forum called Hackers Show Off, where hackers boast of the Israeli and Western sites they have infiltrated. The site’s administrator, Hackers Pal, claims to have defaced 285 Israeli websites. The site also contains forums to share information on general hacking tools and skills.
http://gaza-hacker.com/
The Gaza Hacker Team Forum is for sharing general information on hacking as well as a place to showcase the team’s skills and achievements. The Gaza Hacker Team is a small group that conducts both political and apolitical attacks. It was responsible for defacing the Kadima party website on February 13, 2008. The forum has a recruiting function: members can join the Gaza Hacker Team by displaying sufficient skills and knowledge on the website.
The administrators of the Gaza Hacker Team forum state that their goal is to develop a community around their forum. They post guidelines for members instructing them to encourage, support, and assist one another, and to focus on creating a sense of respect and community rather than the rivalry and competition present in other forums. “This forum is your second home,” states one administrator, “in which reside your friends and brothers to share knowledge with you and to share in your unhappy feelings when you are upset and in your joy when you are happy.”
http://www.v4-team.com/cc/
This is the site of the Arabs Security forum, which is affiliated with DNS Team.
http://al3sifa.com
This is the site of the Storm forum, which is also located at 3asfh.com. This is an Arabic language forum on hacking and other technical topics. Its members do not appear to be as heavily focused on Gaza-related hacking as the other forums. The forum was online in the early January 2009, but it was down as of February 1.
http://arhack.net/vb
The Arab Hacker website