While Hacktivits started to launch DDoS attacks against “Anti-Wikileaks” organizations, I think that this war will be one of the biggest cyber attacks ever seen before. It might be the biggest of all as long as we see more pressure on Wikileaks.
As noted before that DDoS attacks need Internet robots or bots to launch the attack. The strength of the attack depends on the number of controlled machines inside the Botnet which their capacity are used to overwhelm the target’s resources and bring it down! In most scenarios those machines are infected with malicious software to launch the attack and the capacity then will depend on the number of infected machines around the globe which controlled by the attacker(s). But what I can see in Pro-WikiLeaks cyber army is the voluntary activities launched using dedicated software which is freely available online. This type of new tactic and strategy will bring more damage as long as the number of volunteers is increasing. But no one can prevent other groups from joining this type of attacks with their own capabilities!
Another strange side of Wikileaks’ war is an E-Book published for Amazon Kindle Reader! The book is written by Heinz Duthel with review and analysis of the cables! Amazon which shutdown Wikileaks website is now selling the cables!!! Read the full story.
“It is normal when you can’t control the cyberspace or when you have special agenda”
At Middle East level, ANHRI reported that Saudi Arabia blocked access to Elaph electronic newspaper for publishing Wikileaks coverage! Blocking and filtering the Internet is well-known in the Middle East countries especially when it comes to politics!
Newspapers also stated that a Lebanese daily newspaper’s website got hacked Thursday, December 9, 2010.
“Our website has been down all day, and we think it has something to do with our coverage of the WikiLeaks documents,” Al-Akhbar Managing Editor Khalid Saghieh told Al-Masry Al-Youm in a phone interview on Thursday.
When I tried to access the website at 10 PM, I noticed that it redirects to http://www.f2f5.com/ which belongs to someone in Saudi Arabia and appears to be related to other sites managed by the same person with the same IP!!! (According to who is database)
At the moment of writing this article, Al-Akhbar website brings this error “Error 503 Service Unavailable” which is a server side error. At the same time the f2f5.com was down!!!
Investigating the collected data tells that their domain hijacked and may be their administrative email got hacked too!
It is not a website hacking case.
There is a lot of information which could be collected easily as their domain data was updated today!
There is no evidence that their website got hacked because of publishing Wikileaks cables but further investigation with their domain registrant and hosting provider could bring more.
Will we see more cases like this in the Middle East? Of course!
Website defacement and domain hijacking is well-known in the Middle East because of low level security awareness and other related issues. But as long as there is Wikileaks, we will see more news about websites “got hacked” because of publishing Wikileaks!
It might be a new method for Propaganda!