Denial Of Service Attacks Against Danish Sites

From Webproworld ...

One of the biggest international controversies right now surrounds political cartoons run in a Danish newspaper back in September. The issue's come to a head in recent weeks and while the world watches the testy mobs in the middle east, web sites based in Denmark are getting attacked.

Many members of the Islamic faith took the political cartoons in the Danish publication, Jyllands-Posten, very poorly. The inflammatory political cartoons presented images suggesting the prophet Mohammed was a terrorist. The fallout has been overwhelming on this issue as embassies are assaulted, riots are in the streets and people are killed. One other method of protest/attack comes from the assault on Danish and some other western site over this big issue.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor's Note: CyberTerrorism or CyberProtest? The events out of Denmark
and the rest of the world surrounding this cartoons has turned into an
unmitigated disaster that has spread onto the Internet. Give us your input on
the Security Forum at WebProWorld.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a recent report by cybercrime monitoring organization Zone-H, it was noted that nearly 600 attacks occurred on Danish sites alone. When combined with attacks against Israeli and other western sites, the total comes to almost a thousand. Zone-H said they noticed a lot of activity in the Islamic hacker communities. Here's what Zone-H said:

What came out from the survey is what Zone-H very much expected: the use of the Internet as an instrument to spread out cyber protests related to what happens in the worldwide context. Several hacker groups from different Muslim nations united their forces in order to produce the larger amount of damages in Danish and more generally western web-servers. During the attacks they promoted both moderate and extremists manifestos through the defacement of the homepages promoting also a boycott campaign throughout the digital Ummah against Danish products.

In fact in one of the highlighted attacks the hacker going by the handle DarkBlood clearly incites the Ummah community to avoid Danish products by quoting the website www.no4denmark.com. But Zone-H noted many other, and more threatening examples: warning for suicide bombing attacks were posted on http://amris.dk forums by the "IIB - Internet Islamic Brigades", and threats for a coming Jihad have been used to crack many other web-servers from all over the western and non-western world.

Available from BrightTools, Activeworx Security Center includes new features for meeting SOXand HIPAA compliance requirements, improved tools for forensic investigation, and much more.


One major way to attack websites is to deface them. A defacer known as Darkblood had retired from his cybercriminal activities, came back specifically for this. This is what they posted:

"HIS EXCELLENCY, Dr. Per Stig Møller the minister of the foreign affairs of the Denmark Peace be upon those who follow the true guidance: I have reviewed what some of the news agencies dealt with concerning the Danish news agency Jyllands-Posten had published, which I believe it to be a heinous mistake and dreadful deviation from the path of justice, reverence and equality. The said agency published 12 cartoon caricatures on the 30th of September, 2005, ridiculing Mohammed , the messenger of Islam. One of these cartoons pictures Allah's Messenger PBUH, wearing a turban that resembles a bomb wrapped around his head. What a pathetic projection! I was extremely saddened to read such news. I personally visited the site of the agency on the net. I examined the size of the blundering scandal it was. On Sept 29th, 2005 issue of , Jyllands-Posten, I saw and read dreadful news and cartoons. The news and the cartoons were horrifying and extremely disturbing to me. I believe al Muslims who read, viewed or learned about this news were equally saddened, disappointed and disturbed. All criticized such work and felt awful and dismayed about it. Similarly, I do believe that all sane and wise people, I believe, would feel the same about it"

This report shows a couple of important points. First, political/religious assaults are becoming more commonplace on the Internet. Zone-H identified this as a growing trend they've seen a number of times. This leads into the next point and that's cyber security.

It's quite probable these sites didn't have premium security and they got hacked as part of a political agenda. This emphasizes the point that governments need to worry about such issues as well. Who's to say these groups won't start going after networks that run Denmark's government or some other western nation. British Parliament got hacked. The U.S. government's been hacked. In both cases, it was suggested the hacking was done by another nation. But consider a number of groups are out there and they are officially unattached to any country. If these groups could enlist a few quality hackers, which many probably have, they could easily do damage to various points of our infrastructure.

It's kind of a frightening prospect really.

 

There's more on this from F-secure weblog, including some screenshots of the hacked pages. Not sure why I still can't post links, but try f-secure dot com.