'MUJIHADEEN' - Hackers take out US government sites

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'Mujihadeen' Hackers Take Out US Government Sites

By Brian McWilliams, Newsbytes WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 30 Nov 2001, 9:48 AM CST

Two Web sites operated by the United States government were attacked Thursday by a group that threatened violence against Americans.

The hackers vandalized the home page of the NOAA Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, as well a Web server operated by the National Institute of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute, according to a mirror of the defacements captured by the Alldas defacement archive.

Both defaced pages bore the flag of Saudi Arabia and contained titles that read, in Urdu, "Allah is the greatest of all." At the bottom of the pages was a sentence that read in Urdu "Americans be prepared to die."

The hackers did not identify the name of their group but signed the pages "anonymous."

Officials from the two U.S. organizations were not immediately available for comment. Both Web sites, which were running the Apache Web server on the Linux operating system, were unreachable today.

In the message at the NIH site, the attackers called themselves "mujihadeens" and wrote "we are not hacker, we are just cyberterrorist." On the NOAA site, the group threatened "the greatest cyberterrorist attack against American government"

Separately, a Web site attacker from a group called World Of Hell today defaced a server operated by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).

The home page of the Army's Waterways Experiment Station was replaced with the World of Hell logo and a taunting message that included greetings to numerous other defacers.

The attacker, who used the nickname Rivver, claimed to have obtained classified information that he threatened to distribute.

According to a copy of the original site cached at the Google search engine, the ERDC's mission is "to conceive, plan, study and execute engineering investigations and research and development studies in support of the civil and military missions of the Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies."

Among the groups listed in the "shoutz" section of the World of Hell defacement was GForce, a Pakistani hacking crew that recently formed the Al-Qaeda Alliance to attack Department of Defense sites. GForce defaced two military sites in October.

A mirror of the NOAA defacement is here: http://defaced.alldas.de/mirror/2001/11/29/hpcc.fsl.noaa.gov/ .

The NIH site defacement is mirrored at http://defaced.alldas.de/mirror/2001/11/30/snoop.nhgri.nih.gov/ .

The Army site defacement is mirrored at http://defaced.alldas.de/mirror/2001/11/30/www.wes.army.mil/ .

Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com .

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2001


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