Information Security News: Hackers strike Al-Jazeera Web site

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/826273p-5833382c.html

By PETER SVENSSON
AP Technology Writer
 
(March 25, 2003 4:09 p.m. EST) - Hackers attacked the Web site of Arab 
satellite television network Al-Jazeera [1] on Tuesday, rendering it 
intermittently unavailable, the site's host said. 

The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday and 
posted images of the corpses of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, was 
hardest hit in a bombardment of data packets known as a 
denial-of-service attack. 

Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media 
and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began 
Tuesday morning local time. 

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web 
site, denied that an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. 
He said it was difficult to access because traffic was almost four 
times more than expected. 

The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers 
that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. 
Arrashid said he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the 
U.S. servers were affected, leading him to suspect that the attackers 
were in the United States. 

He said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not 
estimate when the site would be fully available again. 

In denial-of-service attacks, hackers normally send a deluge of false 
requests to Web servers, overloading them and making them unavailable 
to surfers. 

Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, is an unusually independent and 
powerful voice in the Arab world whose broadcasts of U.S. prisoners 
and war dead has angered many Americans. 

Earlier, Al-Jazeera said two reporters had their credentials revoked 
by the New York Stock Exchange because of the network's coverage of 
the war. The exchange said the decision was prompted by space 
constraints. 

Al-Jazeera's English site was unavailable Tuesday from four out of 
five locations in the United States, said Roopak Patel, a senior 
analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that 
tracks Web performance. 

He said the Arabic site had starting Sunday experienced periods of 
very poor availability - which may have been caused by hackers, Patel 
said. 

[1] http://english.aljazeera.net/



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