December
3, 2006: In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
recently issued a warning that Islamic terrorists were planning an Internet based
attack on American financial companies. This turned out to be much ado about
nothing. Some jihadis were blowing smoke on a wannabe web site, and DHS
believed it was necessary to cover their butts by issuing an alert. Wall Street
has more to worry about from Russian gangs, who do use DDOS (Distributed Denial
of Service attacks) for extortion, and clever hacking to seek out valuable
data. No gangster is going to rent his botnet to some Islamic yahoos, and bring
Delta Force down on themselves. Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a very low
level of Internet skills. Breathless news articles about what Islamic
terrorists are actually doing on the Internet, indicates that the jihadists
have achieved skill levels commonly found among junior high school level hackers
in the West. While there is certainly potential for Islamic terrorists to
become dangerous on the net, that potential is very slow in developing. Crying
wolf like this will eventually backfire when some jihadis do get their
cyber-act together and carry out an attack with some teeth.
