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Cyber Jihad Called Off

Published: 2007-11-05. Last Updated: 2007-11-05 16:02:56 UTC
by Johannes Ullrich (Version: 1)
4 comment(s)
Ok. Not really. But a lot of what you read may just be hype. Over the last couple days, quite a few readers asked us about our opinion regarding the "cyber jihad" that's supposed to start on November 11th. Couple reasons we think this is not going to be an issues:

  • the site calling for it has tried to do so before without success
  • November 11th is also the official start of carnival, at least in germany, and a day for hoaxes
  • Even if something is going to happen, I doubt it will be more then a lame DoS attack
So in short: stay calm, focus on best practices and you don't have to do anything special on November 11th. If your systems are secure, they will be fine. If they are not secure, then they will get hacked no matter if its cyber jihad or the script kiddie from next door.

In the past, political attacks like this resulted in some more or less manual DoS attacks. Expect things like calls for supporters to reload particular "offensive" websites, or use the ping command to flood them. In some cases, supporters may be asked to install trojans. But chances are that the usual criminals will just take advantage of this and use it as a trick to install the regular criminal bots.

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
Chief Research Officer, SANS Technology Institute.

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Comments

For some reason I just noticed there is a comment function now. Glad to see it!

I agree, probably just a lame DoS attack with Electronic Jihad tool.
Yes. I didn't advertise the comment function so we don't get overwhelmed.
This 'jihad' is interesting though does anyone have any concerns of this 'jihad' and the storm worm botnet?
The two, as far as we know, are unrelated. As Dr. J says the jihad is mostly hype from what we can see.

There may be some room for opportunists to take advantage whilst we are all looking in an other direction. Other than that biz as usual.

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