The Hindu : Hackers on the rampage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 22, 2003

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National

Hackers on the rampage

By K. Srinivas Reddy

HYDERABAD March 21 . The U.S.-led attack on Iraq has fuelled a digital war in the cyber-world with anti-war hackers going on the rampage defacing hundreds of websites and posting messages denouncing the United States on Friday.

The cyber-world had also seen launch of at least three types of virus codes affecting personal computers worldwide and more intensified digital attacks seem to be in the offing. The software techies are bracing themselves for another attack from Melhacker, a Malaysian virus writer, who had earlier threatened to launch a new worm, `scezda', if the U.S. launched a war on Iraq. Melhacker had earlier launched the worm `Nedal' (Laden in reverse).

The continued digital attacks by hackers and virus writers forced computer security agencies the world over to release alerts about impending attacks. As on Friday, over 1000 sites had been defaced by a pro-Islamic hacker group, Unix Security Guards (USG) and Silver Lords. The USG is believed to be having hackers, from Egypt, Morocco, Kuwait and Indonesia, as its members.

Two more cyber vandals — dum.my and tum.my (presumably from Malaysia) and Last Attack (origin not known) too have defaced hundreds of websites and posted anti-Bush slogans on homepages.

The USG put out verses from the Holy Quran and announced its opposition to the war on Iraq.

Mirrors of the defaced websites can be seen www.zone-h.org/en/defacements

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