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19,000 French Websites Hit By DDoS, Defaced In Wake of Terror Attacks
An anonymous reader writes Since the three day terror attack that started in France on January 7 with the attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, 19,000 websites of French-based companies have been targeted by cyber attackers. This unprecedented avalanche of cyber attacks targeted both government sites and that of big and small businesses. Most were low-level DDoS attacks, and some were web defacements. Several websites in a number of towns in the outskirts of Paris have been hacked and covered with an image of an ISIS flag. The front pages of the official municipality websites have been covered with the Jihadist militant group's black flag. In a report, Radware researchers noted that Islamic hacker group AnonGhost has also launched a "digital jihad" against France.
It seems the attacks only targeted known vulnerabilities in Drupal and Joomla. Sites that did not use them, and site that were up to date, just experienced high loads.
The only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably is the Quran. And, conspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept. Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision or a ban on fine arts.
Tellingly, severe punishments for blasphemy and apostasy appeared when increasingly despotic Muslim empires needed to find a religious justification to eliminate political opponents.
In addition, Muslim extremists seem selective in their outrage:
The Quran praises other prophets — such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus — and even tells Muslims to “make no distinction” between these messengers of God. Yet for some reason, Islamist extremists seem to obsess only about the Prophet Muhammad.
Even more curiously, mockery of God — what one would expect to see as the most outrageous blasphemy — seems to have escaped their attention as well.
Finally, the action *actually* recommended by the Quran is simply: Do not sit with them ...
Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah, though, the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: “God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”
Just “do not sit with them” — that is the response the Quran suggests for mockery. Not violence. Not even censorship.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Iraq still had engineering and medical schools after it was liberated. The Bush administration facilitated partnerships between Iraqi institutions and those in the US and Europe, ending Iraq's isolation from the international community and helped its efforts to rebuild after the long night of Saddam's rule.
http://www.thebulletin.org/web...
An education in occupation
By Hugh Gusterson
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
2 February 2012
Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries -- the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.