The Times: Tech column - Hacktivists/Warchalking/Airport scanners
By David Rowan
You may have missed it, but Pakistan was quietly captured by India this week. The attack, which silenced Islamabad in a matter of minutes, involved that powerful new weapon of war: the unsolicited e-mail. Sent by Indian hackers known only as "sNAkeeYes" and "cOBra", the e-mail used an attached virus called Yaha-E to bring down Pakistan's main government website in the latest politically motivated cyber-attack. They might not know their upper-case letters from their lower, but today's online activists certainly know how to disrupt the enemy.
From Beijing to Bethlehem, politically inspired hackers - known as "hacktivists" - are wreaking ever greater destruction using a few simple keystrokes. In the Middle East, Palestinians have been spreading anti-Israel messages with the "Injustice" worm, and in Sri Lanka, the "Mawanella" virus has been bringing down enemy e mail servers. But today the main cyber-battle is being waged between the world's pro- and anti-Islamic hacker groups. As they launch ever more destructive viruses and denial-of-service attacks, they are causing their enemies real problems - as the unobtainable Pakistan government website (at www.pak.gov.pk) has shown this week.
The threats are growing, and governments can no longer afford to be naive about their potential impact. As tensions rose last month over Kashmir, two pro-Pakistani hacktivist groups - calling themselves the Unix Security Guards and the World Fantabulous Defacers - attacked some 111 business websites in India. A third group based in Pakistan, the Anti-India Crew, has claimed responsibility for 422 attacks in less than a year.
A few clever and motivated programmers can inflict real economic damage on a rival state, apart from the psychological damage caused by "capturing" an official government web page. As we become more reliant on the net to communicate, our civil defence strategy needs to invest far more in technology to counter such potential disruption.
The FBI, which has lately been talking up the possibility of a serious al Qaeda cyber-attack, claims that a malicious hacker could even use the web to disrupt the US power grid or to reprogramme computers that control dams, thus endangering civilian lives. Perhaps, although such predictions seem designed to generate the sort of headlines that lead to bigger departmental budgets - just as the anti-virus industry, rather cynically, is delighting in using cyber-terrorism to promote its software. But even if current risk levels are being exaggerated, Western governments need to take urgent steps to plan for the worst.
++++
YOU may soon start noticing strange chalk circles and squiggles appearing on city walls or pavements. No, it's not the latest unexplained variation on crop circles, but a new grassroots initiative that is taking the internet community by storm. The symbols are an attempt to alert passers-by to the presence of a wireless (or WiFi) network that lets them log on to the net free of charge, using their laptop and a small aerial. The practice of labelling WiFi-compliant streets is known as "warchalking" - and, although internet service providers are not too happy about subscribers sharing their bandwidth, this "hobo language" is spreading as fast as a viral e-mail in places such as London and New York. As with all "hot" tech fads, warchalking even has its own weblog, at www.warchalking.org, where you can watch a new sign language evolve - and, doubtless, the fightback by ISPs against something they would rather we paid for.
++++
When packing for your summer holiday this year, be sure to keep the camera in your hand luggage. The post-September 11 security drive has led many airports to install high-power X-ray scanners for checked-in bags - and, as frustrated photographers have found, the old reassurances about scanners not affecting films no longer apply. "Never again put anything photosensitive in checked bags," Kodak has been warning travellers, especially those using North American airports, where luggage is now bombarded with huge radiation doses. So, if you don't want your snaps to be ruined, make sure your films are examined by hand - or use a digital camera. Not even X-rays can fade your pixels.
(The Times, July 3 2002)
You may have missed it, but Pakistan was quietly captured by India this week. The attack, which silenced Islamabad in a matter of minutes, involved that powerful new weapon of war: the unsolicited e-mail. Sent by Indian hackers known only as "sNAkeeYes" and "cOBra", the e-mail used an attached virus called Yaha-E to bring down Pakistan's main government website in the latest politically motivated cyber-attack. They might not know their upper-case letters from their lower, but today's online activists certainly know how to disrupt the enemy.
From Beijing to Bethlehem, politically inspired hackers - known as "hacktivists" - are wreaking ever greater destruction using a few simple keystrokes. In the Middle East, Palestinians have been spreading anti-Israel messages with the "Injustice" worm, and in Sri Lanka, the "Mawanella" virus has been bringing down enemy e mail servers. But today the main cyber-battle is being waged between the world's pro- and anti-Islamic hacker groups. As they launch ever more destructive viruses and denial-of-service attacks, they are causing their enemies real problems - as the unobtainable Pakistan government website (at www.pak.gov.pk) has shown this week.
The threats are growing, and governments can no longer afford to be naive about their potential impact. As tensions rose last month over Kashmir, two pro-Pakistani hacktivist groups - calling themselves the Unix Security Guards and the World Fantabulous Defacers - attacked some 111 business websites in India. A third group based in Pakistan, the Anti-India Crew, has claimed responsibility for 422 attacks in less than a year.
A few clever and motivated programmers can inflict real economic damage on a rival state, apart from the psychological damage caused by "capturing" an official government web page. As we become more reliant on the net to communicate, our civil defence strategy needs to invest far more in technology to counter such potential disruption.
The FBI, which has lately been talking up the possibility of a serious al Qaeda cyber-attack, claims that a malicious hacker could even use the web to disrupt the US power grid or to reprogramme computers that control dams, thus endangering civilian lives. Perhaps, although such predictions seem designed to generate the sort of headlines that lead to bigger departmental budgets - just as the anti-virus industry, rather cynically, is delighting in using cyber-terrorism to promote its software. But even if current risk levels are being exaggerated, Western governments need to take urgent steps to plan for the worst.
++++
YOU may soon start noticing strange chalk circles and squiggles appearing on city walls or pavements. No, it's not the latest unexplained variation on crop circles, but a new grassroots initiative that is taking the internet community by storm. The symbols are an attempt to alert passers-by to the presence of a wireless (or WiFi) network that lets them log on to the net free of charge, using their laptop and a small aerial. The practice of labelling WiFi-compliant streets is known as "warchalking" - and, although internet service providers are not too happy about subscribers sharing their bandwidth, this "hobo language" is spreading as fast as a viral e-mail in places such as London and New York. As with all "hot" tech fads, warchalking even has its own weblog, at www.warchalking.org, where you can watch a new sign language evolve - and, doubtless, the fightback by ISPs against something they would rather we paid for.
++++
When packing for your summer holiday this year, be sure to keep the camera in your hand luggage. The post-September 11 security drive has led many airports to install high-power X-ray scanners for checked-in bags - and, as frustrated photographers have found, the old reassurances about scanners not affecting films no longer apply. "Never again put anything photosensitive in checked bags," Kodak has been warning travellers, especially those using North American airports, where luggage is now bombarded with huge radiation doses. So, if you don't want your snaps to be ruined, make sure your films are examined by hand - or use a digital camera. Not even X-rays can fade your pixels.
(The Times, July 3 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, July 03, 2002
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