al-Qaeda Cyber Jihad logo

Debka:

In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked up DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden’s followers announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda’s electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On Day One, they will test their skills against 15 targeted sites expand the operation from day to day thereafter until hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources report that, shortly after the first announcement, some of al Qaeda’s own Web sites went blank, apparently crashed by the American intelligence computer experts tracking them.

The next day, Oct. 30, they were up again, claiming their Islamic fire walls were proof against infidel assault.

They also boasted an impenetrable e-mail network for volunteers wishing to join up with the cyber jihad to contact and receive instructions undetected by the security agencies in their respective countries.

Our sources say the instructions come in simple language and are organized in sections according to target. They offer would-be martyrs, who for one reason or another are unable to fight in the field, to fulfill their jihad obligations on the Net. These virtual martyrs are assured of the same thrill and sense of elation as a jihadi on the “battlefield.”

In effect, say DEBKAfile’s counter-terror experts, al Qaeda is retaliating against Western intelligence agencies’ tactics, which detect new terrorist sites and zap them as soon as they appear. Until now, the jihadists kept dodging the assault by throwing up dozens of new sites simultaneously. This kept the trackers busy and ensured that some of the sites survived, while empty pages were promptly replaced. But as al Qaeda’s cyber wizards got better at keeping its presence on the Net for longer periods, so too did Western counter-attackers at knocking them down. Now Bin Laden’s cyber legions are fighting back. The electronic war they have declared could cause considerable trouble on the world’s Internet.

Spamsters are using a virtual striptease game to get human volunteers to decipher the distorted CAPTCHA test words or numbers used to block automated access.

John Murrell:

Spammers are a parasitic plague upon the Net, but when it comes to their mastery of social engineering and manipulation, sometimes you just have to stand back in admiration.

One of the most popular and effective techniques for stopping spammers from, say, automating the creation of new, bogus e-mail accounts is the use of CAPTCHAs — a step in the sign-up process that presents a picture of a word distorted in such a way that a human can read it and enter the information correctly, but a machine can’t. From the spammer’s standpoint, what you really need to get around this is a bunch of human volunteers to decipher the CAPTCHAs and send back the results. But how do you persuade people to do your evil bidding for free? Why you just tap a primitive urge wired into the male brain — the caveman voice that says, “Must … see … naked … women.”

A couple of security outfits have now found evidence of the technique in the form of a virtual striptease “game” that is activated when Windows IE is run on an infected machine. The program presents a partial picture of “Melissa,” who invites you to see more by deciphering a CAPTCHA. Answer correctly and you get a peek at another piece of Melissa and a new CAPTCHA to solve, and so forth.

If you are old enough to have used a computer in the late 1970s, you must have played Adventure. Who knew that the game’s inventor was Will Crowther, or that Adventure was based upon the real Bedquilt Section of Colossal Cave in Kentucky’s Flint Mammoth Cave System?

Adventure is now a topic for scholarship, see: Dennis Jerz’s study in Digital Humanities Quarterly.

More here.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

While Congressional democrats are playing “He said; she said” games on the subject of Counter-Terrorism data-mining in order to bring down Alberto Gonzalez, Newsweek is reporting that US Intelligence Agencies are having difficult keeping up with changes in technology and that all the political games the left and the MSM have played with the Echelon program have also had a real impact, significantly diminishing the program’s effectiveness.

Six years after 9/11 , U.S. intel officials are complaining about the emergence of a major “gap” in their ability to secretly eavesdrop on suspected terrorist plotters. In a series of increasingly anxious pleas to Congress, intel “czar” Mike McConnell has argued that the nation’s spook community is “missing a significant portion of what we should be getting” from electronic eavesdropping on possible terror plots. Rep. Heather Wilson, a GOP member of the House intelligence community, told Newsweek she has learned of “specific cases where U.S. lives have been put at risk” as a result. Intel agency spokespeople declined to elaborate.

The intel gap results partly from rapid changes in the technology carrying much of the world’s message traffic (principally telephone calls and e-mails). The National Security Agency is falling so far behind in upgrading its infrastructure to cope with the digital age that the agency has had problems with its electricity supply, forcing some offices to temporarily shut down. The gap is also partly a result of administration fumbling over legal authorization for eavesdropping by U.S. agencies. …

According to both administration and congressional officials (anonymous when discussing such issues), the White House and intelligence czar’s office are now urgently trying to negotiate a legal fix with Congress that would make it easier for NSA to eavesdrop on e-mails and phone calls where all parties are located outside the U.S., even if at some point the message signal crosses into U.S. territory.

If you’re writing a sceenplay, you need to be aware that personal computers work differently on the big screen. Here’s a FAQ explaining some of the key differences you need to understand.

Examples: In Hollywood movies,

All text must be at least 72 point.

Incoming messages are displayed letter by letter. Email over the Internet works like telegraphs.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Onion produced this 3:00 video report.

“Nigeria was the first nation to report a full economic collapse from the Internet Crash. 94% of its Gross National Product came from Internet ventures.”

From Lifehacker via Karen l. Myers.

The instrument was built by Steve Ward, an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

tesla coil

2:41 video

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

Wired reports on the latest alliance between technology and the Humanities.

After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest [Oldest Medieval MSS. There are a considerable number of fragments from Antiquity. -DZ] copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript — complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection — using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm.

A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer’s Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901. …

The idea is “to use our 3-D data to create a ‘virtual book’ showing the Venetus in its natural form, in a way that few scholars would ever be able to access,” says Matt Field, a University of Kentucky researcher who scanned the pages. “It’s not often that you see this kind of collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields.”

Venice is not the most convenient work site. All the gear had to come by boat and be carried or dragged up the stairs of the library. Built in the 1500s, the library has been renovated periodically, but its builders never envisioned a need for big lights, a motorized cradle, 17 computers or wireless internet.

The group set up shop in an upstairs room, using their own electrical cables and adapters to harness the library’s modest power resources. They covered the window overlooking the Piazzetta San Marco with a black sheet to keep out sunlight that could damage the manuscript. They placed the book, the size and weight of a giant dictionary, on a custom cradle that holds it steady, and turned the lights down low.

No more than four people were allowed in the room at one time, to keep down heat and humidity. The conservator turned each page with his hands and set it against a plastic bar, where light air suction held it in place. The barn doors covering the lights were flung open for the time it took the photographer to snap a shot with a 39-megapixel digital camera, a Hasselblad H1 medium-format camera with a Phase One P45 digital back. As each page was photographed, the classics scholar on duty in the hallway outside the workroom would examine its image to make sure all the text was legible.

Then Field scanned each page to create a 3-D image. Using an ordinary flatbed scanner was out of the question — it would flatten the delicate parchments. So Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, decided to use a laser scanner on a robot arm to make a 3-D scan of the pages.

Passing about an inch from the surface, the laser rapidly scanned back and forth, painting the page with laser light. The robot arm knows precisely where in space its “hand” is, creating a precise map of each page as it scans. The data is fed into a CAD program that renders an image of the manuscript page with all its crinkles and undulations.

“The resolution yields millions of 3-D points per page,” Seales says.

To store the data, the team used a 1-terabyte redundant-disk storage system on a high-speed network. The classicists on duty backed up the data every evening on two 750-GB drives and on digital tape. Blackwell carried the hard drives home with him every night, rather than leave the data in the library.

The next step is making the images readable. The Venetus A is handwritten and contains ligatures and abbreviations that boggle most text-recognition software. So, this summer a group of graduate and undergraduate students of Greek will gather at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., to produce XML transcriptions of the text. Eventually, their work will be posted online for anyone to search, as part of the Homer Multitext Project.

Iliad Manuscripts and Fragments

Walter Leaf (Loeb Library, 1886) on Venetus A

slideshow

Internetnews:

Some of the worst spammers in the United States could be in for a rude surprise shortly, as Unspam Technologies has taken the first steps in tracking them down, with help from the ISPs.

The company filed a lawsuit yesterday in the Eastern District of Virginia seeking the identities of spammers under the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the state of Virginia’s own anti-spam statute. The suit seeks damages that could potentially reach $1 billion, but Unspam said it would be happy with driving spammers out of business.

The idea of suing spammers may seem as ludicrous as suing God; where do you deliver the subpoena? But Jon Praed, the lawyer on the case, founding partner of the Internet Law Group and one of the top lawyers involved in spam suits, said not to think that way.

“We cannot fight them by treating them as if they are everywhere, because it lulls us into a false acceptance of the inevitability of the outcome,” he told internetnews.com. “If we focus on what they are using or make it hard to use those tools, we’re going to beat them. We are not fighting Acts of God, we are fighting criminal acts.”

Unspam’s secret for dealing with these non-deities? Project Honey Pot, a trap for spammers. Spammers use crawlers to crawl through every page on a Website for valid e-mail addresses, and then add these addresses to their database.

Any Website operator can download the Honey Pot software and it will set up a dummy page that gives a fake, unique e-mail address to the crawlers. When spam comes in to that unique address, it’s a double gotcha; both the IP address of the crawler that harvested the fake e-mail address is known, and Honey Pot also scores the IP address of the sender of the spam.

As a result, Honey Pot has collected 2.5 million IP addresses of spam senders and 15,000 IP addresses of crawlers. Now comes the one-two punch. The company has released what it calls the http:BL, a blacklist of the 2.5 million compromised computers.

Most spam today is sent out by a compromised computer with a zombie, or bot (define) installed on the computer. The users of these computers almost always have no idea they are compromised, because they have no antivirus software installed to stop such infection in the first place.

Well, with the http:BL they will find out. The blacklist can be installed on any Apache-based Website, so when one of the 2.5 million IP address with a botnet running on them visits that site, the site can deny them access to the home page and inform the user of their infection.

Punch number two is for the 15,000 IP addresses of crawlers. Those are the people collecting and selling e-mail addresses. Harvesting is a slow process and botnets are expensive to rent by the hour, so the spammers do it themselves, on their own computers with a constant connection, since one is needed.

Gotcha, said Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam and Project Honey Pot. “Those will be some of the first targets from this litigation,” he said. “We’ve identified very specific targets. In some cases have a good sense of who these people are. Then we can bring the full weight of the law down on these people who are breaking it.”

The worst offender for spam crawlers is the U.S., with 22.7 percent of harvesting coming from U.S. IP addresses. Romania is second and Japan is third, both with less than ten percent of the harvesting addresses.

The lawsuit grants subpoena power, which the ISPs wanted. …

Russia has the bad reputation for spam and viruses, but Prince said there is a delineation between spam of U.S. and foreign origin. “I would say that in terms of selling physical products, anything that has to be shipped, they tend to be here. Mortgage types are here too. The ones in other countries are committing straight fraud, like the Nigerian princes or fake bank account,” he said. …

Praed doesn’t expect to squash all spammers but he does hope to make life rotten for a lot of them. “We don’t have to catch them. We just have to make it so costly for them that they move on,” he said. “We know we have limited resources and it’s one lawsuit, but we realize acts of spam are not like Acts of God. By targeting the case on the worst of the worst we think we can have an impact.”

Complete article

Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune lists the most popular choices, and wonders who would tell his password to a pollster?

1. password

2. 123456

3. qwerty

4. abc123

5. letmein

6. monkey

7. myspace1

8. password1

9. blink182

10. (your first name)

Operated by PC.

2:52 video

vCrib.com

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Afflicted North America from 8:00 PM last night to 10:00 AM this morning. The cause has not yet been identified.

But Popular Mechanics thinks it knows.