Program automating online jihad found in the wild

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/08/electronic_program_of_jihad_discovered/

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The Register
8th November 2007 

Security researchers say they have discovered a program that could be 
used by Islamic terrorists to launch data attacks against Western 
targets.

The "Electronic Program of Jihad," as its creators have dubbed it, asks 
for a username and password once it's installed, according to this entry 
on the McAfee Avert Labs Blog. The program, quoted as version 3.0, then 
tries to join a cyber jihadist website that coordinates the attack. 
Loyal users can even score bonus points by referring newcomers.

The revelation comes two weeks after Israeli news website Debkafile 
reported calls by an Islamist website for true believers to mount 
electronic attacks on "Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and 
Shiite websites". Rather than launching the assault through a network of 
compromised PCs, the organizers reportedly plan to supply a package 
called Electronic Jihad Version 2.0 that volunteers could use to unleash 
denial-of-service attacks against the targets.

Many security experts have said the report should be treated with a 
liberal dose of skepticism. They argue that Debkafile is a 
less-than-reliable source and say grass-roots-based cyber attacks by 
militant Islamists already happen all the time.

The icon for the Electronic Program of Jihad bears the symbol of al 
Qaeda's Cyber Warriors, matching one presented by Debkafile in a recent 
press release. Even still, McAfee researcher Francois Paget stopped 
short of saying the program is directly connected to the reported 
cyberjihad.

"I wrote this blog entry to demonstrate that at least one terrorist ring 
is interested in malware," he wrote. "But it seems to me, they have not 
reached the technical level of some criminal groups, for now."

For one thing, the system has no fast-flux network or other 
decentralized command-and-control features, so it would be relatively 
easy for someone to take it down. And for another the cyber jihadist 
website supposedly coordinating the attack is currently unreachable.

Similarly, Gadi Evron, a Security Architect at Afilias Global Registry 
Services, also discounted the likelihood that the software represented 
much of new threat.

"My educated guess would be that this is 'just yet another tool' that 
some enthusiasts on a web forum developed, Evron wrote in an email to El 
Reg. "There are many enthusiast 'cyber terrorists' of a low technical 
and operational level who deface web sites and launch DDoS attacks of 
varying success for clear political goals, ranging from US politics to 
the Middle East to the far east."


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