Cyberterrorism Is Not Just for Kids

2000-12-11 20:10

http://israel.internet.com/dec00/cyberterror1.html By Tania Hershman Associate Editor, israel.internet.com December 11, 2000 [JERUSALEM] Cyberterrorism is real, said the speakers at a conference here on Monday on confronting online terrorism and anti-Semitism, and it is no longer child's play. "The terror has stopped being a tactical threat and is becoming a strategic one which influences public opinion and forces governments to make decisions," said Shabtai Shavit, chairman of the board of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the one-day conference organized by the Anti-Defamation League and the Minister of Israeli Society and the World Jewish Community. ICT's webmaster, Yael Shahar, went into more detail about the different types of what she preferred to call "information terrorism", from electronic warfare, where hardware is the target, and psychological warfare, which involves inflammatory content, to hacker warfare. It is this last which is in fact cyberterrorism, she said. However, the problem stems not just from those who may perpetrate these attacks. "The real threat to our society is not what they can do, but what we believe they can do," she said. While Shahar stressed that the mass destruction that cyberterrorists could wreak is not (yet) a reality, Israel Radio's Internet correspondent, Eli HaCohen, has been following the extremely active situation in the Middle East. "I never thought I would become a war correspondent," he said. "The "field of war" [the computer screen] is a small one, but the action never stops." The really intense activity began after three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by the Hizbollah on the border between Israel and Lebanon in early October, he said. Israel hackers broke into one of Hizbollah's web sites and that launched a flood of activity. In "denial of service" attacks, anti-Israel hackers have brought down Israeli sites by flooding them with thousands of emails, he said. This is a phenomenon seen worldwide in conflicts from the war in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo to enmity between China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan. Hackers succeeded in bringing down the Israeli Parliament or Knesset's site, and not only did they deny access, they destroyed files which the government is now being forced to recreate. They also brought down Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' web site, which was extremely damaging, said HaCohen, because it was the prime Israeli web site disseminating official information about the government's activities. Not only was the Israeli Defense Forces' site brought down, but Israeldefenseforce.net , a domain name which the IDF did not have the foresight to purchase, was turned into an anti-IDF page. The tools for carrying out these activities are freely available to all, said HaCohen. "I have heard people say that Internet warfare is a game for children, but it is also a game for adults," he concluded. "The damage is very serious." ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".

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