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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.

25 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Beats using bullets by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A slightly better form of protest than AK47's I guess.

    1. Re:Beats using bullets by khasim · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's a step in the right direction.

      Now, instead of just posting a graphic of a flag, how about posting some justification? Explain what you are objecting to and why you find it objectionable.

      You have the attention of the media.

      Unless you're a bunch of teenage script kiddies doing this for the lulz.

    2. Re:Beats using bullets by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Can you think of any good targets? Religious radicals with a...vehemently...nostalgic enthusiasm for an imaginary medieval ideal tend not to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture production.

      Come to think of it, a movement with that sort of ready access to alienated 20something guys who loath the foundations of the society around them could probably be competitive in the production of Punk, and maybe some metal subgenres, except that they think all that stuff is haram. Oh well.

    3. Re:Beats using bullets by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Inconveniently, there isn't enough epistemological common ground for asking for justification to work terribly well. Religions based on revelation(which includes islam, along with the other Abrahamic monotheisms, and a number of others to greater or lesser degrees) consider 'because god said so.' to be not only not a shoddy cop-out; but to be the best, most certain, category of justification.

      Exactly how it is that they came to know that god said so(since he didn't say so to them; but allegedly to some other guy, now dead, can be a little touchy; but I've rarely found it to be a productive avenue for discussion.

    4. Re:Beats using bullets by nbauman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you think that they really believe in God, any more than Christians, Jews and members of Western religions do, then you should take a political science course. Religion is just an excuse to steal things from other people.

      The only ones who believe that God bullshit are the dumb people on the bottom, like the ones who voted for George W. Bush and the Republicans against their own interests.

      John Dean, the presidential counsel who ratted on Nixon, wrote a book about how the Republican party discovered the strategy of appealing to stupid religious hicks with a bait and switch on abortion, gays and other social hot-button issues, in order to manipulate them into voting for conservative candidates who would cut taxes on the rich along with government services that actually benefited the stupid religious hicks. Dean wrote a series of articles about this on Findlaw, if you want to look them up and read them free.

    5. Re:Beats using bullets by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Can you think of any good targets?

      Saudi Arabia - Sheiks, bankers. After all, they're the one pulling the strings of their 'jihadist' puppets.

    6. Re:Beats using bullets by fustakrakich · · Score: 3

      Yes, but now we have two dollar gas, so today they're our friends.

      Anyway, it looks like the wars have started in earnest.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    7. Re:Beats using bullets by circletimessquare · · Score: 3, Insightful

      post scandalous images of the prophet on their forums

      anyways, internet technology is a product of the secular institutions of the west. i'm not sure why or how they reconcile the use of modern technology with their medieval abusive "beliefs." of course, they don't, they're violent morons incapable of critical thought

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    8. Re: Beats using bullets by cold+fjord · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      Saddam did immense damage to the country by diverting its resources into arms deals and building palaces instead of education, medicine, and other necessities. That is before you get into the political repression, mass murder, and so on.

      The Islamists that you can't quite bring yourself to condemn specifically targeted Iraqi intellectuals for murder, people like professors, doctors, and engineers.

      Pro tip: Don't let your butt hurt over policy disagreements cause you to lie, i.e. "until GWB destroyed them".

      Irony alert: Somehow I can't imagine you suggesting to any other country or group of terrorists that they not attack another country full of engineers: the US. Funny how that works.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    9. Re: Beats using bullets by nbauman · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    10. Re:Beats using bullets by davydagger · · Score: 3, Interesting
      that my friend is pure propaganda based on speculation.

      ISIS supporters are mostly westerners, people who grew up with technology, and a firm grasp of western culture. They seem to be able to use computers just fine.

    11. Re:Beats using bullets by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      lots of good targets.. hack their sms gateways, post shit about the people who try to benefit from west hate(plenty of such people. they benefit from it locally, like selling usa flags for burning you know, most of them don't really care shit about what happens 10 km from them), hack the islamist nations sites and put on information on how to bypass their censorships, links to news sites, links to just sites about their own countries laws so they understand that the local warlords are fucking them up the ass and that the tribe shit belongs to 17th century and they - their ability to learn how technology works, the future of their occupational careers, the future of their wealth and health - is all getting fucked up by extremists who claim the west is exploiting them when the worst exploiter for any one of them is the village chief and corruption! corruption includes paying thugs to go shoot neighboring village up with ak47's to "gain advantage" on price of khat or whatever the fuck their petty dealings center around.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Better a DDOS by msobkow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Better a DDOS than murder.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:Better a DDOS by cold+fjord · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unfortunately it is an "AND", not an "OR".

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  3. Did they deface Slashdot too? by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or is the layout just broken again?

  4. Weak attack, weak security by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. "19,000 attacked with low level DoS" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So basically less annoying than spam.

    Pretty sure the correct solution is ban any method of communication which the government can't listen in on. That'll mean a camera with microphone in every bedroom, of course.

    Those guys in Paris are failed terrorists unless they succeed in inciting acts of terror by European government against their citizens - and there is nothing more terrorising than the thought you're always being listened to by men with guns with the power to lock you up, no matter who you intend to communicate with - in which case they will have been successful terrorists.

    Just as, after the first few months of 9/11, there was clearly nothing to fear except from US government finding an excuse to destroy freedom. Again, the book on those terrorists could have been closed as "killed a lot of people, but did not change the American way of life", but instead we find they were successful too, because they incited the US government to destroy freedom.

  6. I'm not sure I understand why... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... there's this issue with blasphemy and/or images of the Prophet. According to this NY Times article Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy by Mustafa Akyol, there is actually *no* prohibition in the Quran and such things were only added later as part of Shariah Law, by people wanting control:

    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. . . .
    1. Re:I'm not sure I understand why... by fnj · · Score: 4, Informative

      there is actually *no* prohibition [of blasphemy] in the Quran...
      the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept.

      Koran (4:89) - "They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper."

      Is there some problem with the translation? Seems fairly clear to me.

    2. Re:I'm not sure I understand why... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Informative

      there is actually *no* prohibition [of blasphemy] in the Quran... the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept.

      Koran (4:89) - "They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper."

      Is there some problem with the translation? Seems fairly clear to me.

      Take it up with the guy (who I presume is a Muslim) who wrote the NYT article, I was simply quoting and conceding that he probably knows more about this than I (and most /.'ers) do. However, according to this Qur’an 4:89 Commentary, the quote you listed is (commonly) taken out of context (the link has the full verse) and in context really means:

      ... this verse also only commands Muslims to fight those who practice oppression or persecution, or attack the Muslims.

      ... These verses were revealed by God to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), at the time when Muslims were attacked by the non-Muslims of Makkah on a regular basis.

      I am not even remotely knowledgeable, but it seems like something open to a bit of interpretation. Wouldn't it be nice if those people doing the interpretation and passing that on to their followers, focused on interpretations that involved killing fewer people?

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    3. Re:I'm not sure I understand why... by gman003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's nothing in the Bible about abortion or gun laws, and barely anything about homosexuality, yet those are like the three biggest religious-right political issues. And hell, Jesus was basically more pro-communist than Lenin, but during the Cold War, no siree, it's us good Christian capitalists versus those damned heathen commies. So obviously "it wasn't in scripture" isn't going to stop religious nuts.

  7. Re:comment by Noah+Haders · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd say the biggest blow to civil liberties was when islamists went into a newspaper office and killed everybody. that's what I call a chilling effect.

  8. Terror attacks by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Please do not use the terms "terror attacks" or "terrorism" for the murders at Charlie Hebdo. This is not terrorism, as french people are not afraid. Otherwise there would not have been millions in the streets, vulnerable to real terrorist attacks.

    On the other hand, french journalists are afraid because they feel they could ne the next attacked, and their reports suggest terror is widespread, but it is a fake perception for the whole french society.

  9. Re:comment by cold+fjord · · Score: 3, Informative
    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  10. I *have* read the text by msobkow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have read the text a couple of times. And it clearly states that Muslims are to DEFEND themselves against oppressors without mercy, but to live amongst them in peace if they are not being attacked.

    But that doesn't play into the ideology of fanatics, so they conveniently skip those caveats when quoting their text.

    Much as Pat Robertson and Westboro Baptist are very selective about their edited "quotes".

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.