Israeli-Arab Warfare, Web-Style

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,39587,00.html

Reuters
10:50 a.m. Oct. 20, 2000 PDT

BEIRUT -- Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group said on Friday its
website server crashed earlier this month after being targeted by
millions of hits and hostile emails from Israel and the United States.

It said the crash occurred on Oct. 7, the day Hizbollah guerrillas
captured three Israeli soldiers in an ambush at the border in south
Lebanon

"We have names of 8,521 servers mainly in these two countries that
have been hitting our website regularly and sending us simultaneously
tens of thousands of hostile emails, some of them carrying viruses to
sabotage our server," Ali Ayoub, the group's webmaster, told Reuters.

"This is a well known method used to kill websites. This is Israeli
technological warfare."

Hizbollah's website provides detailed information and news on the
group's policies, statements and guerrilla attacks. Hizbollah says the
site normally gets between 100,000 and 300,000 hits a day depending on
developments in the region.

"We noticed that the number of hits on our website increased
significantly at the beginning of the month after we started showing
live video clips and information about the killing of Palestinians by
Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza," Ayoub said.

"The number increased to nine million hits per day, mainly from
Israel, the United States and to a lesser degree from Canada and South
Africa. It became a real e-mail bombing," he added.

Ayoub said Hizbollah dealt with the problem by launching seven back-up
sites on different addresses while trying to fix and upgrade the
capacity of the main website to cope with higher numbers of hits.

Ayoub said the website was important for Hizbollah in its campaign
against Israel.

"We will never give up the Internet," he said. "We have successfully
used it in the past when we showed video clips and pictures of the
damage caused by Israeli bombings on Lebanon."

Hizbollah's war of attrition helped force Israel to pull out its
troops from south Lebanon in May, ending a 22-year occupation.


*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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