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Gaza Conflict's Shadow 'Cyberwar'
New Media Upend Traditional Thinking About Wartime Information Flow and Raise Cybersecurity Concerns
Muslim Hackers Growing
Although the sites featured images of injured children and inflammatory, expletive-laden language, Warner said the cyberattacks were strictly intended to spread propaganda.
"They are veiled and probably useless threats," he said.
Warner said that because he is working with law enforcement he is unable to share many specific details about the hackers' locations and profiles. But he and his colleagues have been monitoring several international groups for years, some of which coordinate about 10,000 hackers.
Although some of the hackers Warner monitors are world class, he said, many are low-skill recruits who are enlisted and then trained to perform "script kiddie" attacks. These hackers don't need real technical expertise, just enough know-how to run someone else's program, he said.
"It really doesn't take a lot of skill to become involved in this kind of attack, it just takes motivation," Warner told ABCNews.com. For those who want to support the cause but don't necessarily want to be a martyr, this is "a low-risk way to become involved in the conflict."
Hackers aren't necessarily interested in commandeering high-profile government or corporate sites. They just use a program that automatically searches for any site that's in Israel (and to a lesser degree right now, the United States). Any Israeli site successfully hacked, regardless of whom it belongs to, is considered a "win," he said.
The world has seen cyberpropaganda wars before, Warner said. After the collision of a Chinese fighter jet with a U.S. Navy plane in 2001, tens of thousands of U.S. sites were defaced by Chinese hackers blaming the United States for the incident. And, after the Danish publication of cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in February 2006, Muslim hackers targeted Danish and American Web sites.
But, he said, training academies that teach recruits how to infiltrate Web sites are causing the numbers of Muslim propaganda hackers to significantly increase.
"More and more people are receiving training," he said. In these recent cyberattacks, he estimated that roughly one-third of the groups performing the hacks were previously unknown to him.
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