Saturday 27 September 2008

Russian and Iran hacking into military websites

As we sleep here in the West, the wicked around the world are at it 24/7. A spate of hacking incidents in the US, Israel and our allies has evinced a bellicosity that is of grave concern. Reston Va. firm iDefense has been able to ascertain that the recent attack on Lithuanian state computers emanated from Russia. These attacks shut down the National Ethics Body and the Securities and Exchange Commission inter alia. Kimberly Zenz of iDefense noted the fact that a similar attack on Estonian systems also emanated from the Russians, noting hack-wars.ru as playing a central role. Ha'aretz reported this summer on Iranian attacks on Israeli computer systems, and Today.AZ outed the Russians intel services for attacks on Azerbaijan government computer systems.
Should this be more widely aired? Yes, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, NSA and DIA have all come to similar conclusions lately regarding the source of cyber hacking - it is embedded in Western countries, where the Russians and Iranians all have agents. Liberal campuses are often hotbeds of espionage, and the more computer literate students are turned into traitors by dint of filthy lucre.
So the world is like a ticking time bomb, the 5th columnists working away at their laptops at a college campus near you. The recent case of Gary Mckinnon in the US serves to highlight this concern; he is a Western hacker who got into the Pentagon, he claims, from a home computer with a 56K modem...OK, we believe it, but Kevin Poulsen of Wired News is not buying this or the nerd syndrome defense. I've been on the web to read Poulsen's article and found lots of ignorance and anti-Americanism. Read it and weep.
Due to the large multi-national community in the UK, both the Russians and the Iranians have been able to operate more freely and hook people like Gary Mckinnon. Recently the Russians also poisoned a UK citizen, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, under the noses of MI6 - and just footsteps away from the US Embassy. The Iranians shot a UK policewoman from their embassy. It is an undeclared war.
But despite all this, tomorrow, supporters of cyber terrorist Gary McKinnon will also be footsteps away from the US Embassy - some with support from Americans here who hate America and Israel. The battleground, however, is not limited to these spaces or even entire countries, it is in cyber space and must be fough there tooth and nail; spy vs spy, and; mouse vs. mouse.

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