Al-Jazeera Site Experiences Hack Attack

From: biollante (biollante@biollante.com)
Date: 03/26/03 

From: "biollante" <biollante@biollante.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 07:58:28 GMT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25577-2003Mar25.html

Al-Jazeera Site Experiences Hack Attack

By Peter Svensson
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 25, 2003; 4:52 PM

Hackers attacked the Web site of Arab satellite television network
Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, rendering it intermittently unavailable, the site's
host said.

The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday and posted
images of the corpses of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, was hardest hit in a
bombardment of data packets known as a denial-of-service attack.

Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and
Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began Tuesday
morning local time.

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web site,
denied that an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it
was difficult to access because traffic was almost four times more than
expected.

The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that
host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. Arrashid said
he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the U.S. servers were
affected, leading him to suspect that the attackers were in the United
States.

Security consultant Steve Manzuik at Entrench Technologies Inc. in Calgary,
Alberta, said a study of Internet addresses related to Al-Jazeera's U.S.
servers pointed to a technical problem other than an attack.

"If anything, I think they have other issues," he said.

Al-Jazeera's French servers were unavailable, however, in a way that did not
exclude the possibility they were under attack, Manzuik said.

Arrashid said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not
estimate when the site would be fully available again.

In denial-of-service attacks, hackers normally send a deluge of false
requests to Web servers, overloading them and making them unavailable to
surfers.

Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, is an unusually independent and powerful
voice in the Arab world whose broadcasts of U.S. prisoners and war dead has
angered many Americans.

Earlier, Al-Jazeera said two reporters had their credentials revoked by the
New York Stock Exchange because of the network's coverage of the war. The
exchange said the decision was prompted by space constraints.

Al-Jazeera's English site was unavailable Tuesday from four out of five
locations in the United States, said Roopak Patel, a senior analyst at
Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that tracks Web
performance.

He said the Arabic site had starting Sunday experienced periods of very poor
availability - which may have been caused by hackers, Patel said. 

---
On the Net:
http://www.aljazeera.net
http://english.aljazeera.net
TechNews.com Home
© 2003 The Associated Press

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Al-Jazeera Site Experiences Hack Attack
    ... > Al-Jazeera Site Experiences Hack Attack ... > host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. ... > he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the U.S. servers were ...
    (alt.computer.security)
  • Re: Port 80 SYN flood-like behavior
    ... > were on the receiving end of such an attack a little over one month ago. ... > across a LARGE number of TCP servers. ... > SYN/ACK packets ... ... Traffic reflection off routers ...
    (Incidents)
  • [REVS] DNS Amplification Attacks
    ... DNS Amplification Attacks ... One of the networks under attack indicated some ... exploited name servers. ...
    (Securiteam)
  • Analysis of SSH crc32 compensation attack detector exploit
    ... Analysis of SSH crc32 compensation attack detector exploit ... detector vulnerability to remotely compromise a Red Hat Linux ... Active Internet connections (servers and established) ...
    (Incidents)
  • Re: Strange DoS / new halflife server bug? (Update)
    ... misconfigured/old versions of halflife servers. ... The public available exploits CANNOT create this attack. ... service attack (e.g. read possible vulnerable servers from a file). ... > world's premier technical IT security event! ...
    (Incidents)
Quantcast