Hackers attack Iraq's vulnerable computers

BAGHDAD -- Maj. Ahmed Khathem, the head of Iraq's newly formed cybercrimes division, sits in a borrowed office, at a borrowed desk, working on a laptop borrowed from one of his subordinates.

It is his unit's lone computer, highlighting the country's vulnerability to a community of Iraqi hackers defacing websites and attempting to hack into sensitive internal networks.

Iraq's government is engaged in a bloody struggle against al-Qaeda, and its computers make a prime target for global terror networks that have added hacking to their arsenal.

"We could have the most powerful anti-hacking force in the world, but we'd still have no computers, so we couldn't do anything," says Ali Hussein, one of 12 computer science graduates added to the cybercrime team last month. "The government thinks about guns, tanks and raiding houses. Hackers just aren't a priority."

Computer usage in Iraq has mushroomed since the U.S. invasion in 2003. During the Saddam Hussein era, Internet access was largely forbidden in the country, and economic sanctions made computers difficult to obtain. The Interior Ministry, which had no computers connected to the Internet in 2003, has 5,000 today.

"Now, the government is starting to use computers everywhere, but these computers aren't protected," Khathem says.

In May, an innocuous pop-up window flashed onto the screen of an employee at the Ministry of Interior, Khathem says. The window asked if he wanted to install updates to his computer.

Had he clicked "OK," he would have given a hacker who calls himself the "Iraqi Hacker" access to reams of sensitive data, including e-mails and addresses of the ministry's thousands of security officers.

"If that information had fallen into the hands of terrorists, it would have been a catastrophe," says Lt. Alaa Hussein, another member of the ministry's anti-hacking team.

Fortunately, the employee was savvy enough to alert the cybercrimes division.

The United States has seized hard drives in Afghanistan and Iraq with information on sabotaging oil pipelines through hacking, according to Paul Kurtz, a former member of President Bush's National Security Council and co-author of the national strategy for cybersecurity.