My day job has been keeping me from maintain this blog, dammit. My last posting was about the Electronic Jihad program and the amount of hits I received. Following up on that article, I started researching the report following November 11. The media consensus is that it all of the threats and warnings related to Electronic Jihad amounted to nothing.
Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs called it the Weak Horse and pointed to an analysis of the actual Electronic Jihad software at McAfee's Avert Labs blog.
All told, the little bits of analysis make the code look to be written by high school or early college kids. If their network gets large enough, maybe they could have caused harm. Right now the websever isn’t working and the app seems like a no-go. I’d suggest everyone block traffic to the server http://al-jinan.net and stop worrying.
With respect to Charles and Avert Labs, the point of November 11 was not the success of an attack. I believe it was a PR test and a trial balloon to see how many willing participants could be used. As I said in my previous article, if nothing significant was reported on November 11, future cyber attacks would be taken less seriously.
Compare cyber terrorism to real world terrorism. In spite of the fact that Bin Laden openly declared war on the West in 1996, he was dismissed by most Westerners as just a man with very little reporting on his philosophy's origins to the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. Even considering September 11, 2001, terrorism is not treated by the Western media as a threat to every day life. While the World Trade Center attack was a spectacular success for Islamic terrorism in both scale and inspiration, the West has failed to unite and stop terrorism worldwide. If anything, the West is more divided.
Most of the time, terror attacks are not spectacular for the terrorists. Bus bombs in Israel may kill dozens, but not thousands. The murder of filmmakers, authors, and cartoonists may affect but doesn't actually cease the production of movies, books, and editorial cartoons. Even the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings didn't lay waste to New York. For these reasons, I think looking at fighting terrorism as a war fails because of the media's tendency to compare to historical scale. In the media's narrative, September 11 was an isolated event. The Iraq War cannot escape continual comparisons to the Vietnam War, even though the facts of both are completely different.
The result is that failures are also successes for Islamic terror because the media's narrative that there is no war is supported. Each individual act of terror, whether successful or not, is reported as a unique event. Overall, the more failures there are, the less coverage terrorism gets. In many cases, like the riots in Paris, related stories avoided all together because they fill in the links between terrorism and the culture that supports it.
Back to the Electronic Jihad story, I think the growth of cyber terrorism is following the same pattern. The November 11 Electronic Jihad stories, both before and after, minimized the threat of cyber terrorism and the eventual goals. In the same way reports of individual acts of terrorism ignore the context of the broad global culture of radical Islam, individual mainstream stories on cyber terrorism have no context. Don't forget Younis Tsouli, who used his script kiddie skills to enable terrorism.
So what if Electronic Jihad is a program a first grader could code? The point is the culture behind it and the continued attempts to coordinate terrorist wannabes online. There is so much more to Electronic Jihad than scattered denial of service (DDoS) attacks. It is part of the step-by-step culture of radical Islam as it spreads like a virus into every aspect of our lives. It's been a long time since 1928 and terrorists are patient.
Recommended Reading:
- Electronic Jihad v3.0 - What Cyber Jihad Isn't
- A Cyber Jihadist DoS Tool
- “Electronic Jihad” - Not November, But Never?
- The Electronic Jihad (that wasn’t) (from 2006)
- Electronic jihad, not yet... (from 2004--notice the narrative hasn't changed)
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