Hackers becoming more and more politically active

The number of web attacks which are
not financially motivated is on the rise.
“Welcome to the front lines of the 21st
century information war”, comments the Wall
Street Journal about an Internet attack that
took place on the FreeEurope Radio server.
Altogether eight websites belonging to the
broadcasting service were not accessible for
several hours. Symptoms that first seemed
like a completely normal server failure turned
out to be a calculated attack. More than
50,000 maliciously generated site calls per
second forced the service to its knees.
The potential originator of this cyber attack:
Belarusian President Alexander Lukaschenko.
The regime presumably wanted to prevent
the transmission of an opposition report by
using Hacktivism, i.e. politically motivated
hacking. This should remind you of the end
of the Soviet Union. Virtual attacks used
to be carried out on radio and TV stations
before the Internet became so popular. For
example, the Soviets used to interfere with
the transmission of content it wanted to
suppress. Lukaschenko is considered to be
an ardent fan of the USSR.
Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
attacks have no remedy. The technique
behind such attacks is always similar.
In the case of a three-hour attack on
the CNN website, for instance, Chinese
hackers spread a specially programmed
tool to those who took part in the protest,
turning their computers into a “botnet”.
At a pre-determined time, the participants
simultaneously started something like a
DDOS attack. The tool sent completely
legitimate calls for a website. However, they
were incredibly fast and in massive numbers.
The CNN server couldn’t process the flood of
enquiries, and crashed.
At present there is no simple means
of protection against these attacks. The
American radio service solved its problem
by simply limiting the number of enquiries it
could accept from the Asian region. However,
this only suppressed the problem till the
attack was over and did not actually solve
anything. As the rest of the world could easily
call the website, bonafide visitors from China
and India were locked out for hours on end.
Incidentally, Hacktivists who don’t manage
to motivate enough participants also indulge
in such forms of attack. The Internet mafia
can rent out their botnets for just $100 a
day, perfect for conducting such political
activities. DDoS attacks from botnets have
most commonly been used for blackmailing.
At first, a small show of strength will prove
to the victim that their site can be thrown
offline, and then money is demanded. If the
to-be-victims don’t accept the demands for
payment, then their servers are bombarded
and forced down for several days. For
commercial sites, this can be a disaster.
They stand to lose far more in profits if their
customers can’t access the sites anymore