Al Jazeera's TV's website has been at the center of reports on the cyber-war now being waged on Arabic sites, by American hackers.
JORDAN (Star) - Al Jazeera’s TV’s website has been at the center of reports on the cyber-war now being waged on Arabic sites, by American hackers.
Amidst few reports of an American-Iraqi cyber war on other fronts, the Al Jazeera story has taken center-stage; probably due to the fact that it was the first TV network to air pictures of American prisoners of war (POWs) and was the only station to put those pictures on its website.
Apparently, these American hackers managed to gain access to the site through its hosting company, diverting its contents to a site called Net World and modifying them, replacing the images of American POWs with an American flag with a message underneath saying “Let Freedom Ring...”.
These hackers call themselves the Freedom Force Militia and, according to some reports, are actually a legitimate company called ‘Freedom’.
These de-facement attacks were being performed on different days, throughout the last two weeks, and culminated with the site going ‘down’ due to a Denial of Service attack, with a massive amount of service requests being made at once.
Some commentators believe the site was under pressure from millions of visitors anyway, because of all the Americans logging in to see pictures of the POWs, but Al Jazeera’s web host later confirmed that the site was down due to an attack.
It is back online now, continuing to report the war, still subject to attacks here and there.
To see Al Jazeera’s website log into www.aljazeera.net.
© The Star 2003
