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Fighting terrorism propaganda on the Internet

Date: September 16, 2004
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: Dmitri Kramarenko

Russia -- In dramatical September days where all the country were stuck to TV, radio and news portals, people time and again asked heartily where were these greatly praised "Russian hackers"? Why could not they just deface terrorist websites? Let try to answer.

Firstly, computer hacking is a tool of a criminal, not defender. Civilized world should not resort to illegal means, in order not to stand in one row with barbarians. It is a well-known and very popular principle nowadays. Even fighting absolute evil, terrorism, we should pick and choose instruments.

Secondly, it is almost impossible to destroy the website. Dmitri Leonov, a mastermind of security website bugtraq.ru and co-author of "Attack on the Internet" book, said "There is no sense in defacement, any defaced website is renewed at the worst in several hours or they just change the hosting in several days. In the second place, targeted hackings of certain websites are realy rare. It's a mistake to think that it's possible to break up any website if only desired. As a rule, usually you only consecutively scan the network to detect known vulnerabilities. There are no miracles, when your target website is located at sound hosting, whose managers care for security, there's only one option to deface it by a distributed attack for a while. But you should spend so much time to be prepared for it, and the effect will be momentary."

Generally, it's possible to hack into or suppress the website, but it's temporary, until the owner takes protection measures. Even is all information will be erased from the server, it could be restored from back-up copies.

That's why we consider official means to fight illegal websites to be the best.


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Discussion is closed - view comments archieve
2007-01-15 08:29:41 - IMHO, the above is legalistic defeatism!... Andrey
2006-06-12 21:03:12 - *naive xt
2006-06-12 21:00:39 - Please provide proof that "computer... xterity
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