Winds of Change.NET: Cyber-Attack Target Needs Your Help!

October 22, 2003

Cyber-Attack Target Needs Your Help!

by Joe Katzman at October 22, 2003 7:48 PM

As noted in yesterday's features concerning the DoS cyber-attacks and their likely perpetrators, the top target of the on-line crackers who took so many blogs offline yesterday was a site called Internet Haganah (trans: "Internet Defense"). They maintain a database of al-Qaeda affiliated sites around the net, and also work to get them shut down. Unfortunately, the recent attacks have stressed their resources, and they need your help:

"For Internet Haganah to have a fighting chance of surviving such attacks we need to mirror our site at multiple locations, on different backbones, in different datacenters. This costs money, money we don't have.
Contributions to Internet Haganah at this time will go towards securing additional servers, domain names, DNS services and other expenses related to making our presence on the internet more resistant to future attacks."

You can see As-Sahwah's official gloating here. That's all the explanation you need for why this is a worthy cause, and contributing helps us all by giving us a template and testbed for better blog defenses. As our reader 'Paul' noted:

"I think when he finally gets back up we should all send Aaron 25 bucks so he can mirror his sites. He is doing his part to keep our sorry butts from being blown up by terrorists."

Yes, he is. Jonathan Galt of the Yahoo! Terror Web group chimes in with the donation links:

You don't have to wait until he's back up to send him the $25. There are several mirrored sites on free web servers which have PayPal buttons -- it looks like he's more than half way to the goal:
Geocities 1

Geocities 2

Geocities 3

150m 1

150m 2

Tripod 1

If you've ever wondered how you could make a personal contribution to the war effort, this is one such opportunity. The Winds of Change.NET team strongly encourages our readers to give to this worthy cause, and keep Internet Haganah standing watchful guard on behalf of us all.

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Comments

#1 from Tom Holsinger at 8:15 pm on Oct 22, 2003

Disable the attack. The attack is coming from Malaysia. Civil action is not feasible against the web hosts who make the attack possible. Instead close down as many Malaysian servers as possible with DOS attacks. Ask American hackers for assistance.

Don't wait for the government to act. Do it ourselves. That will force the government to act.

This has happened before. Some militia wannabe nutballs bought a ranch in Montana and began harassing their new neighbors, which includ armed seizures of portions of their neighbors' land. The local sheriff said he was unable to take action because his deputies were outnumbered and outgunned. Montana's governor refused to send in the National Guard. The feds refused to help too.

So the neighbors organized a real militia, acquired thoroughly illegal crew-served weapons, and began training for an attack to wipe out the nutballs. Word of this got out and the feds finally took action. They surrounded the place and the nutballs surrendered.

It is time for Americans to again do this concerning when attacked by foreign nutballs. We did so on Flight 93.

http://www.strategypage.com/strategypolitics/articles/20021017.asp

#2 from rkb at 8:22 pm on Oct 22, 2003

Also, watch your own email. An email account I've used for posting comments here and at related blogs has sustained multiple virus attacks with Islamic slogans in the last few days.

Anyone else having similar attacks? It would be interesting to know if the email address was harvested with a script (in which case others were probably attacked too) or by hand in response to someone who took exception to an opinion I wrote.

#3 from Dan Darling at 8:44 pm on Oct 22, 2003

Just to clarify, if this was an As-Sahwab attack then it was not coming from Malaysia; As-Sahwab is hosted from Malaysia but frequented by al-Qaeda supporters from the Gulf states.

#4 from Tom Holsinger at 8:57 pm on Oct 22, 2003

Dan,

That's my point. The attack comes from the web host, and the host is in Malaysia where normal civil action for damage here is not feasible.

As-Sahwab can only think evil thoughts absent a web host.

#5 from Trent Telenko at 10:37 pm on Oct 22, 2003

When you are dealing with irrational opponents, as we are in th case of As-Sahwab and Al-Qaeda, the only rational response is threat elimination.

Collateral damage is not our concern. It is a problem for other people.

#6 from Tom Holsinger at 10:54 pm on Oct 22, 2003

Trent,

I disagree. Collateral damage is an issue when the means exists to avoid it while still achieving the mission. Blowing up the whole neighborhood to get rid of a pesky gopher is excessive.

But when the issue is whose web servers are closed down, better those in some other country than ours. If the governments of Malaysia and the United States do not want their countries to become the battlefields for such private conflicts, they can do something about it. Right now they aren't, and don't even care.

So it's up to us.