Several news and information sites carrying anti-war or anti-American content have been targeted recently by a series of massive denial of service attacks in the past 72 hours Pro-Islamic and anti-war digital attacks continue with similar speed and ferocity as on the day the war started.
Al-Jazeera's English web site (english.aljazeera.net) came under intermittent denial of service attacks on 25th March and again today. Al-Jazeera has faced criticism from the United States for re-broadcasting Iraqi TV's footage of American PoWs. The English-language Al-Jazeera web site contained disturbing imagery of
civilian victims, which has also made it a target.
Zone-h (www.zone-h.org), a digital attack mirroring site that chronicles pro-Islamic and anti-war protest attacks as well as general acts of vandalism, also came under severe "Denial of Service" attack on 25th and 26th March which overwhelmed their bandwidth.
Automated bombardment of empty packets, false download requests or excessive user traffic can all lead to a site being inaccessible, a situation known as "Denial of Service" (DoS). Although Al-Jazeera believed yesterday that excessive user traffic was responsible for the DoS, today they haven't ruled out the possibility that it is an ongoing DoS attack on their web sites as they continue to remain partially
inaccessible.
The National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) operated by the FBI recently warned against patriotic hacking. The sophistication and organisation of the DoS attacks on some of the information web sites, which have recently come under fire despite their complex hosting architectures, is significant. Informed sources in communication with the mi2g Intelligence Unit are inclined to believe that the DoS hackers exhibit skill-sets indicative of a corporate, government or military
connection. It could be in the interest of "patriotic American hackers" to silence information sites like Al-Jazeera and Zone-h on the web although nobody has claimed responsibility yet.
"We have seen pro-Islamic and anti-war hackers protest the war with Iraq. Recent web site vandalism has now evolved to the more anonymous and crippling Denial of Service type of attack. We are witnessing the beginning of a new phase - the pro-American counter-attack," said DK Matai, Executive Chairman of mi2g. "Suppression of information sources on the web, censorship or vandalism may not augur well for the future as confidence in Internet services is eroded."

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