Al Qaeda plans to launch an electronic Jihad on Nov. 11, attacking "Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites," according to an unconfirmed report.
The report comes from DEBKAfile, an Israeli online military intelligence magazine, which said on Oct. 30 that its counter-terror sources had picked up a special Internet announcement in Arabic.
According to DEBKAfile, Osama bin Laden's followers announced on Oct. 29 that on "Day One they [would] test their skills by launching cyber attacks against 15 targeted sites" and would expand the e-Jihad thereafter until "hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites."
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The attack would be carried out with a software kit known as Electronic Jihad 2.0, Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism for Secure Computing, has told various news outlets. That software, which has been around for some three years, has purportedly become easily configurable and could be downloaded by attackers who could then launch a distributed denial-of-service attack.
It all sounds serious, but the report is being treated with skepticism by many law enforcement officials, and with good reason.
This is not the first rumor about an electronic Jihad to seize the Internet citizenry's imagination. Aug. 26, 2004 was also supposed to see the Internet go down in e-flames from a sustained and devastating cyber-attack by Islamic cyber-Jihadists, but the rumors at that time turned out to be utterly baseless.
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In my view, this is much to do about nothing. As far as I understand the programs, they are no more than just a simple little programs that generate a ton of web request to a target...basically a manual botnet of sorts.
Given the manual nature of the programs and their limited attack techniques, any backbone network provider could blacklist any offending IPs pretty quickly. Assuming they even have enough people to overload a internet facing website.
In short, I would be more scared of Stormbot, then Electronic Jihad 2.0 as this point.
Al-Qaeda declares electronic jihad (Feb 2004)
'Electronic Jihad' fails to materialise (Aug 2004)
New Website Incites Electronic Jihad (Oct 2006)
The key to these attacks is that they must be done simultaneously by many different users so that they can overload the target site. The hacking program is called the Electronic Jihad Program 1.5 (Silver Edition). One individual in palestinianforum.net claims that the program was designed by a Saudi national.
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