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Indo-Pak cyberspace war escalates 17-fold in 2000
In hacking wars over disputed territories, India and Pakistan's well-known animosity for each other over Kashmir is just behind that other great tinderbox - the Middle East. According to Attrition.org, while the Indo-Pak cyber war has increased by 1,700 per cent over last year (in terms of number of Top Level Domains hacked), the recent Middle East brouhaha has seen a 6,450 per cent increase in Israeli sites hacked. Attrition.org is a computer security Website dedicated to the collection, dissemination and distribution of information about the industry. Seventy-two Indian TLDs (.in) were defaced in 2000, most of them in the latter half of the year, which accounted for 0.72 per cent of all defacements recorded by Attrition.org. Only four were defaced in 1999. However, this may not reflect the true figure, because many Indian dot-com TLDs have also been defaced by Pakistani hackers. And interestingly, just 25 Pakistani TLDs have been defaced in 2000. Either it means that Pakistan has won the cyber war in2000 (even with India being an `IT superpower'), or perhaps it means that Indian programmers have better things to do than carrying forward animosity that goes back generations, into cyberspace. On the Middle-East front, Attrition.org reported that as compared to two Israeli TLDs defaced in 1999, 131 were defaced in 2000. However, most of these came at the fag end of the year when the festering Middle East wound was opened again by protests and violence in Palestine. Out of the over 5,800 TLD defacements recorded by Attrition.org, the largest increase of defacements was among Brazilian TLDs, which actually outstripped the entire dot-com generic TLD. According to Matt Dickerson of Attrition.org, other notables in the list of gains were non-profit organizations, Korea, US academic institutions, the US country TLD (the .us TLD is usually used by United States schools, libraries, community colleges and state government institutions), Argentina, Italy, Germany, the UK, South Africa, US ISPs, and Mexico. On thebrighter side for the US, the US Defense forces seem to winning their wars in cyberspace. According to Dickerson, the largest single reduction (a 48 per cent decline) came from the US military, which appears to have been less of a target after 1999 (no Kosovo this year), and efforts to harden military networks. Likewise, the US government TLD also saw a reduction in the number of defacements, but just barely.In arrangement with India.CNET.com Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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