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- Hacking, previously dominated by teenage
computer whizzkids, often with no particular axe to grind, now looks set
to become a propaganda weapon.
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- Recent cyber-attacks on an Indian army
Website and a pro-Albanian Kosovo site both bear the hallmarks of nationalist
ideological campaigns, and in Belarus, hackers posted defamatory material
on President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's own Web pages.
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- Strangers in Paradise
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- On 16 October, 1998, the Indian news
agency PTI reported that "suspected Pakistani intelligence operatives"
had "hijacked the Indian army's only Website, Kashmir A Paradise,
which gives the Indian view on Kashmir.
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- The Website's guestbook, where users
can leave comments, was "full of anti-India superlatives and four-letter
adjectives," PTI reported, describing the attack as "part of
a cyberwar launched ahead of the Indo-Pakistani talks," which began
in Islamabad that day.
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- PTI quoted unnamed defence ministry officials
as saying there was an urgent need to have an Internet policy to counter
such attacks, but in August an Indian supreme court lawyer, Pawan Duggal,
told PTI that India was "totally ill-equipped to tackle the onslaught
of cyber crimes".
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- The Kashmir A Paradise site was soon
back to normal, but a week after the attack the homepage still warned:
"Desperate hacker keeps on trying," "3 attempts in 3 days".
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- Revenge of the Black Hand
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- On 20 October, 1998, the Kosovo Information
Centre (KIC), which supports the party of the ethnic Albanian leader, Dr
Ibrahim Rugova, reported that "hackers claiming to be members of the
Serbian terrorist organization Crna Ruka [Black Hand] hacked its Web page.
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- The hackers posted a copy of the Serbian
national symbol, and captions in Serbian and English:
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- "Welcome to the Web page of the
biggest liars and killers!", and "Brother Albanians, this coat
of arms will be in your flag as long as you exist!"
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- The KIC said visitors were "outraged
by this hacking", the provider in New York was contacted to prevent
further intrusions.
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- The pages were restored, but the hackers
soon returned with a vengeance.
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- "This site is hacked by Serbian
Hackers Team Crna Ruka. Long Live Great Serbia!!!", their new posting
read.
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- Earlier, the independent Belgrade-based
news agency Beta reported that a Serb hacker had forced a Swiss Internet
provider to withdraw an edition of the Kosovar Albanian newspaper Glas
Kosova from the Internet, by posting anti-Kosovo Albanian messages on the
newspaper's Website.
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- The provider managed to contact the hacker
in Poland, who said he was a Yugoslav student. But when he noticed he was
being monitored, he damaged the hard disk of one of the Swiss provider's
computers, Beta reported.
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- New Challenge for Russian Spooks
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- The Russia TV channel last year reported
that there were "regular attempts by hackers to penetrate the state
authorities' computer networks".
-
- The head of Russia's Federal Agency for
Government Communications (FAPSI) warned that abuse of modern communications
technology could "affect the psychology of nations".
-
- In neighbouring Belarus, the Website
of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been repeatedly hacked into, the
Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
-
- On one occasion, hackers opened a new
Website with an image of Lukashenka "which starts turning, before
your very eyes, first into Hitler, then into Stalin, then back into Lukashenka,"
the paper said in July.
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- Race to stay ahead
-
- Governments are now urgently trying to
stay ahead of the game as information technology becomes ever more sophisticated
and widespread.
-
- In March, Israeli police arrested an
18-year-old believed to be the hacker who broke into the Pentagon's computer
system.
-
- The police had received help from the
US authorities, and several other suspected hackers were detained for breaking
into other systems, including that used by the Israeli parliament.
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- The first prosecutions were brought in
Russia and China this year against computer hackers.
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- In July, investigators in Shanghai arrested
a hacker who had attacked a network in the city, breaking into the codes
and accounts of most of its users.
-
- A Hong Kong-based news agency reported
that the 22-year-old hacker was a computing and mathematics graduate.
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- In January, a court in Sakhalin, in Russia's
Far East, put a hacker on probation for three years for copying commercial
and confidential information.
-
- He was fined about $3,000, the ITAR-TASS
news agency reported.
-
- The Polish Government, however, adopted
a rather less alarmist position on the problem after a hacker had broken
into the database of the Ministry of Economics.
-
- "It saddened me to read that the
hacker is now working for some private company", Prime Minister Wlodzimierz
Cimoszewicz told Polish radio.
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- "I would like to employ him in the
government service," he said.
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- BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk),
based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information
from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150
countries in more than 70 languages.
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