Inter Engineering

The war in Iraq has several indirect effects to public data networks. These effects are not caused by the possible network warfare campaigns launched by US or Iraq armies, but by independent hackers who want to get their own message across.

These hackers can be divided to three groups:

US-based patriotic hackers, who want to join the war against Iraq but have no others means to do it except by attacking the virtual enemy through networks. This might mean launching a distributed denial-of-service attack against the e-mail server of Iraqi embassy or web sites of Iraqi companies.

Islamic extremist groups from around to world who are trying to fight back to the perceived enemy by launching attacks against US sites and especially .mil websites.

Peace activists who are not for USA or for Iraq but just against the war. For example, we've seen several computer viruses released which carry an anti-war message or are trying to use the situation otherwise for their own advantage.

Viruses related to Iraq
Lioten found December 17th, 2002 (alias Iraq_Oil)
Prune found March 12th, 2003
Ganda found March 17th, 2003

Melhacker is a Malaysian virus writer who has released several viruses, including Nedal (Laden backwards) and Blebla. Melhacker gave an interview for the US-based Computerworld Magazine in November 2002. In the interview he described a new virus he's written, known as Scezda: "I will attack or launch this worm if America attacks Iraq. The worm has been ready and fully tested since August."
Defacements related to situation in Iraq
A wave of defacement activity started 48 hours before US attacked Baghdad - more than 200 sites were hacked. Most of these were related to Iraq crisis.
The number of hacked sites during Friday, March 21st, has been constantly increasing. The reporting systems have problems dealing with the load and the number of hacked sites can only be estimated. It's clear that over 1000 sites have been defaced between midnight and 3:00 PM EET. The actual number is probably much higher and keeps increasing.

Many of the web defacements have an anti-war message, but some have direct anti-USA or anti-Iraq slogans.