Cyber Terrorism

MAJOR CYBER TERRORISM INCIDENTS 

Iraqi hackers disrupted troop deployments during the Gulf War. In 1994, a 16-year-old English boy took down some 100 U.S. defense systems. 

In 1997, 35 computer specialists used hacking tools freely available on 1,900 web sites to shut down large segments of the US power grid. They also silenced the command and control system of the Pacific Command in Honolulu. 

Since December 1997, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) has been conducting web sit-ins against various sites in support of the Mexican Zapatistas. At a designated time, thousands of protestors point their browsers to a target site using software that floods the target with rapid and repeated download requests. EDT's software has also been used by animal rights groups against organizations said to abuse animals. Electrohippies, another group of hacktivists, conducted web sit-ins against the WTO when they met in Seattle in late 1999. 

In 1998, a 12-year-old boy successfully hacked into the controls for the huge Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona, USA. He was in a position to release flood waters that would have inundated Mesa and Tempe, endangering at least 1 million people. 

In 1998, Spanish protestors bombarded the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) with thousands of bogus e-mail messages. E-mail was tied up and undeliverable to the ISP's users, and support lines were tied up with people who couldn't get their mail. The protestors also spammed IGC staff and member accounts, clogged their Web page with bogus credit card orders, and threatened to employ the same tactics against organizations using IGC services. They demanded that IGC stop hosting the web site for the Euskal Herria Journal, a New York-based publication supporting Basque independence. Protestors said IGC supported terrorism because a section on the Web pages contained materials on the terrorist group ETA, which claimed responsibility for assassinations of Spanish political and security officials, and attacks on military installations. IGC finally relented and pulled the site because of the "mail bombings". In 1998, ethnic Tamil guerrillas swamped Sri Lankan embassies with 800 e-mails a day over a two-week period. The messages read, "We are the Internet Black Tigers and we're doing this to disrupt your communications". Intelligence authorities characterized it as the first known attack by terrorists against a country's computer systems. During the Kosovo conflict in 1999, NATO computers were blasted with email bombs and hit with denial of service attacks by hacktivists protesting the NATO bombings. In addition, businesses, public organizations, and academic institutes received highly politicized virusladen e-mails from a range of Eastern European countries, according to reports. Web defacements were also common.


In 2000, the Asian School of Cyber Laws was repeatedly attacked by Distributed Denial of Service attacks by “hactivists” propagating the “right to pornography”. The different Cyber Law Groups has spearheaded an international campaign against pornography on the Internet. 

In 2001, in the back drop of the downturn in US-China relationships, the Chinese hackers released the Code Red virus into the wild. This virus infected millions of computers around the world and then used these computers to launch denial of service attacks on US web sites, prominently the web site of the White House. In 2001, hackers broke into the U.S. Justice Department's web site and replaced the department's seal with a swastika, dubbed the agency the "United States Department of Injustice" and filled the page with obscene pictures. In the first six months of 2002 the hacker group GFORCE-Pakistan has conducted more than 150 reported cyber attacks against Indian targets to further its ideas on the Kashmir issue. 

In 2002, numerous prominent Indian web sites were defaced. Messages relating to the Kashmir issue were pasted on the home pages of these web sites. The Pakistani Hackerz Club, led by “Doctor Neukar” is believed to be behind this attack.