MSNBC Hezbollah Web site gets attacked
"Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group said Friday its Web site server crashed earlier this month after being targeted by millions of hits and hostile e-mails from Israel and the United States."

"“We have names of 8,521 servers mainly in these two countries that have been hitting our Web site regularly and sending us simultaneously tens of thousands of hostile e-mails, some of them carrying viruses to sabotage our server,” Ali Ayoub, the group’s Web master, told Reuters.

“This is a well known method used to kill Web sites. This is Israeli technological warfare.”

redux [09.06.00]
First Monday "Internet & Society" in Armenia and Azerbaijan? Web Games and a Chronicle of an Infowar
"In 1996 in the days when the norms of Web behaviour were still fluid (and how-to books on 'netiquette' were still being written), I found it somewhat intriguing to check the log files of the EASST Review, the Web site of an academic journal that I administer. I would examine the log files to see who or what was hitting and linking to the site. From the "traces" - the DNS information and the referral logs - I could deduce on a couple of occasions who was searching the Web for themselves and had visited the site. Back in those summer days (I only found time to do it in August), it was amusing to send some scientists a congratulatory message, saying that we were glad they found themselves on the EASST Review site, with the hope that they would return again soon. We dubbed the practice 'academic humor'.

In 2000 it is now not so funny to play those Web games, and worse ones, certainly in Armenia and Azerbaijan. While I was in Yerevan, Armenia at the "Internet & Society" conference organized by the Armenian Information Technology Foundation, and sponsored by the United Nations Development Program, the Open Society Institute and the Council of Europe, I learned how far Web games have gone, and how seriously they are taken. Armenia and Azerbaijan, I understood, have been engaged in an 'infowar'. Having read analyses of this coming peril [1], I took it upon myself in the aftermath of the conference to find out just what that is in practice, and draw up some implications for "Internet & Society in Armenia and Azerbaijan.""

Rand Corporation In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age
"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.

While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."

redux [03.22.00]
CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online
"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today
“Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."