IT News is running a story about cyber terrorism and electronic jihad (entitled, “Electronic Jihad’ app offers cyberterrorism for the masses”). They report that Al-Jinan.org, an “electronic jihad” group, has launched a “Web-based application [which] offers Islamic jihadis a way for even the relatively nontechnical to target and attack Web sites perceived to be anti-Islamic.”
They then proceed to quote a couple of “experts” on “electronic jihad” and monger some fear about Islamic terrorism on the Internets.
Contrary to popular opinion, cyber terrorists are not teenage girls who post inane vlogs of their vacuous lives on the Internets, but uber-l33t h4×0rs who write Windows software targeting theological websites. Even the highly “Interneted” Estonia does not escape the clutches of those cheeky cyber terrorists.
The problem with this story, of course, is that Al-Jinan.org is not promoting any terrorist activities (despite what the word ‘jihad’ leads the ignorant to think). Their campaign is more about ideological warfare than anything else; they have only been targetting anti-Islamic websites thus far. Not exactly a “disruption of economies”.
The second problem is that Al-Jinan’s web application is actually a Windows application, and everyone knows that any self-respecting cyber terrorist would use Linux (or Mac). The application itself is primitive: the target websites are automatically downloaded from the Internet, but the user has to manually trigger the attack at an agreed upon time. The application then provides traffic to the target website, resulting in a conventional DDoS attack.
Lame.
Relaunch Al-Jinan.org as a Web 2.0 application, replete with Rails, Ajax, and an ad-revenue model, then send me an update on Twitter.
7 comments ↓
I am not so sure that a self-respecting cyber-terrorist would use a Mac. Self-respecting graphics designer, maybe.
On the other hand, the non self-respecting cyber-terrorists will be so dazzled by the Mac, its durable UNIX core, the flawless Aqua interface, the minimalist design and the ease of use, that all thoughts of cyber-terrorism will be shunted aside by the ensuing rapturous wonder.
There’s my predictive model for nullifying the threat of cyber-terrorism. That’ll be $200,000 please.
Sounds like a sure winner! Give free Macbooks to every Muslim youth in Sydney.
If you hurry, you can get an application in for the next rounding of funding. Here are the application forms.
There’s plenty of room at the trough!
Eudaemonion you sound like the dude from those MAC V PC adds.
I didn’t understand any of the technical jargon, but I’m suitably outraged nonetheless.
Shadower, dude, I wish! I’d be a flush with $$$ were that the case. I probably wouldn’t be on this blog either.
Building on this idea of spiffy hardware to counteract the rise of radicals, maybe we should just help Negroponte with his one laptop per child project which want to get (just over) $100 dollar laptops into 3rd world countries: and it’s got the Mac attitude of form and function together, and designed to work (and create mesh networks) in places where most PCs are useless. (The rabbit ears and yoyo powersource are cute too!) And here is the IEEE spectrum review with better graphics.
Leave a Comment