Re: Kaspersky Labs says Electronic Jihad on the Internet quite possible tomorrow

["Jay D. Dyson" <jdyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Steve wrote:

> The Russian news agency, Novosti, has reported Kaspersky Labs has warned
> about a large-scale virus attack on the Internet that might be delivered
> by Islamic terrorists on August 26.
>
> http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=4759214&startrow=11&date=2004-08-24&do_alert=0
>
> Anyone have any more information on this?

        If I may be so bold, this is nonsense.  First off, any
ankle-biting scriptkiddy knows that network outages do not evoke a sense
of terror.  Such events evoke nothing but annoyance.

        Secondly, any such network-wide outage would require the DoS'ing
or destruction of all network root servers.  That's been attempted before
and was a spectacular failure from the perspective of the attacker.

        Finally, Islamic terrorists do NOT trust high technology vectors
for their attacks.  Their "smart bombs" are suicide bombers (as used
across the globe); their "torpedoes" (like what hit the USS Cole) are
bomb-laden boats with suicide captains; their "guided missiles" on 9/11
were our own aircraft with suicide pilots.  The pattern here is obvious:
their attacks are either low-tech or no-tech.  This does not give them
much credibility in terms of "cyber warfare" (sic).

        If you ask me, I'd say the Russian news agency in question either
has a technologically-ignorant or positively incompetent reporter who's
been hoodwinked by some fast-talking scriptkiddies.

- -Jay

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