Cyberterrorism: a new reality
By Vladimir Golubev
Date: November 20, 2003
According to information security experts the most vulnerable to cyberattacks countries are 6 states of the Middle East: Iran, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, the Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. USA is a "black-list" also.
Thus, for the first half-year 2003 the quantity of hacker attacks against United Arab Emirates has increased in 3 times in comparison with the second half-year 2002. The country has incurred multi-billion losses. Only one incident resulted in long time deactivating servers of ATM Company has caused up to $3 billion losses.
The first wave of hackers activity at the Middle East has been fixed after the beginning of Al-Axa-Intifada (September 2000). The next wave has been fixed after tragical events in the USA on September 11, 2001. The third wave of hacker attacks has covered the Middle East in spring 2003 after the beginning of operation "Freedom to Iraq". And, frequently, attackers were the "neutral" hacker groups from China or East Europe and were acting in cyber-war for the sake of 'sports interest'.
According to Symantec Company experts, frequently the hacker attacks are directed to the governmental and financial bodies, but officials hide this event from the public and explain disable of the servers with "technical reasons". Besides, countries of the Middle East increase their charges on computer safety (in 2003 they spent more than $150 million for services of infosec experts).
Computer Crime Research Center
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